[dayvid]

Even in those companies at the higher level you need additional skills to figure out impact and opportunities (opportunity sizing, XFN alignment, communication, good writing, etc.). Interviewing mainly gets your foot in the door.

There are some genius ICs who can just code and not be concerned about these things, but more often the higher levels are people who are good at their skill along with business, data analysis, product and communication skills.

[scarface74]

I agree with this completely and honestly didn’t think about this.

In my department in BigTech (consulting) your first paragraph is expected from an L5.

Good written and verbal communication skills and being able to work with customers is the expectation of an L4/new college grad.

Now that I think about it, I don’t think I have met an L5 SDE that I would let have anything to do with my customers directly. But I’m equally sure they wouldn’t let anyone in my department push code to core services (even though I have found a bug in the code of a core service and worked with an SDE to fix it).