[morgante]

He's looked at levels.fyi.

He even links to it from his resume.

His problem is that he thinks L10 is the benchmark to compare against, when the vast, vast majority of engineers (including many with decades of experience) would never make it to L10.

[gloryjulio]

The benchmark should be l4-l5. Even l6 is rare. His benchmark is ridiculous

[moandcompany]

L10 is generally the Vice President level at a company like Google or Facebook.

The vast majority of engineers will never make it to L10.

[MarkSweep]

I think L8 is equivalent to vice president. L10 is labeled as "Google Fellow" on levels.fyi. There is a Wikipedia category for Google Fellows and it has 9 people listed. I'd be surprised if this count was off by more than an order of magnitude or two.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Google_Fellows

[moandcompany]

L8 and L9 are Director/Senior Director positions. In the software engineering family of career ladders, it is part of the Engineering Manager career ladder, which generally starts at L6, with occasional L5 managers (L5 SWE individual contributors transitioning to manager track).

The technical/individual contributor track also has L8 and L9 Director/Senior Director levels. Sometimes it's referred to as a "Principal" level in Product Areas like Cloud, but there are far fewer L8+ people on individual contributor career ladders (i.e. tracks) than on management ladders.

L8 is considered the start of Google's "executive levels," where individuals at this level and above are privy to executive-level training, perks, etc.

Google Fellows are generally L10 (i.e. Vice President equivalent level), if I recall correctly. Jeff Dean would be a canonical example of a Vice President equivalent level, however Jeff Dean also ended up being a manager/organizational head of the Research Product Area for several years as a Fellow. Vint Cerf may be another useful example of a Fellow / Vice President equivalent.

(My statements here are from having personally done statistical analysis of career ladders and levels at Google and Alphabet as a whole)

[wepple]

Fellow and VP are not the same track.

L8 is director level. So L10 might be both fellow and VP, given that Senior Director exists so is probably L9

[ryandrake]

HN commenters do this all the time, though. They'll take, say, an "L6 Google + Bay Area + Top End + Most Favorable Stock Market" compensation number, and then say "Most tech employees make this much."

[morgante]

Still, L10 is patently ridiculous. He is not L10.

[lesuorac]

What number is that?

Because like L3 is 200k so I'm not sure if you're seeing people post 600k as a reference point or 200k.

[mcguire]

Annual mean wage for Software Developers, 2023, according to the BLS:

                     Metropolitan areas with the highest employment level in Software Developers
    Metropolitan area                  Employment  Employment     Location   Hourly    Annual
                                                   per 1000 jobs  quotient   mean wage mean wage
    New York-Newark-Jersey City,...    119,010     12.53          1.15       $ 73.12   $ 152,100
    San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA  96,590     84.60          7.75       $ 96.06   $ 199,800
    San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, CA   83,920     34.65          3.18       $ 87.13   $ 181,220

https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151252.htm

[ryandrake]

The numbers HNers claim to be "usual compensations" change every year, but they are almost always what would be a top compensation for a top employee at a top faang in a top cost-of-labor locale in a rapidly rising bull market.