[cperciva]

L6 ICs are pretty rare - it already is a top tier of seniority in engineering

Is Google really different from other companies? I talk to a lot of Amazonians (AWS Hero, FreeBSD/EC2 maintainer) and my general impression is that developers below L7 ought to be classified as "Junior" -- my mapping is basically L4-L6 = Junior Developer, L7/L8 = Developer, and L10 = Senior Developer. Anything which doesn't have L7+ involvement gives me major "these kids need adult supervision" vibes for all the newbie mistakes they make.

[nostrademons]

Like others mentioned, Amazon levels are one level below Google levels, and I think their higher ranks are also compressed. Also IMHO Google IC SWE levels of 2024 are about 1.5 levels below Google IC SWE levels of 2009 (i.e. a mid-L6 today is about as good as someone just promoted to L5 in 2010, an L8 promotee today is about a mid-L6 from 2010, a new L4 today is the equivalent of an intern back then). So with that mapping I'd put Google L3-L4 = Junior Developer, L5/early L6 = Developer, mid-L6+ = Senior Developer today.

Fifteen years ago L5 was actually senior, L4 was a developer, L3 was a junior developer. L6+ = you owned major user-visible features with hundreds of millions of users. L9 = you did something world-class like invent BigTable or Google News, and L10 didn't exist.

[mji]

> i.e. a mid-L6 today is about as good as someone just promoted to L5 in 2010, an L8 promotee today is about a mid-L6 from 2010, a new L4 today is the equivalent of an intern back then

This seems extremely surprising. I can believe that the 2010-engineers were more technically capable, but there was also a lot less non-technical complexity involved in getting things done in 2010 than there is today.

[nostrademons]

I'm referring solely to technical skills. I think it is actually harder to be an L6 today because of the sheer number of (both political and technical) constraints you face, but L6s and even L5s in 2010 would do large-scale system design of a sort that basically doesn't exist anywhere within the company today.

[rurban]

Look at her github repos. I would call her a L4 for the technical skills there. Good code, but not top seniority at all.

[bananapub]

that's an extremely stupid way to judge someone, especially given Google's IP contract.

[lexlash]

To be fair to her, those contributions are quite old and probably not representative of current skills.

[codemac]

Nah, you're pretty far off in terms of population numbers at FAANG. Amazon's levels are largely L-1 most places in terms of comp (aka aws L7 gets paid G L6), and 7+ at Meta is ~1% of the company's employees, and even less of it's SWE.

Amazon and Microsoft also have less "alignment" at various levels compared to silicon valley due to literal geographic and historical reasons. Principal SWE at AWS is probably ~L6 at G in my experience. Obviously there are always outliers in all directions.

[cperciva]

Ok, so at Google L3-L5 are junior developers, L6/L7 are developers, and L8+ is senior developers?

[lexlash]

I'm not sure what you mean by "junior" here.

L3 is early career, L4 is mid-career, L5 is senior. You can hit L5 on the strength of pure technical contributions regardless of business/org needs, usually.

L6+ is staff, and tends to involve a very different skillset. (If you're not looking to lead a team, you're probably not going to have the kind of impact that gets you to L6, let alone L7 or higher at Google.)

This is all to say that ICs in the L3/L4/L5 bucket generally show a clear progression in technical skills but beyond that it's fuzzier.

[cperciva]

My definitions are basically: Junior developers need supervision because left to their own devices they'll screw things up horribly; normal developers can produce good code independently; and Senior developers are able to catch the mistakes the Junior developers are making and set them on the right path.

[lexlash]

I see; that's L3, L4, and L5 progression in a nutshell at Google - although leaving L3s alone doesn't _guarantee_ something will go wrong, it was more that there was no way for them to figure out optimal solutions without help thanks to the sheer complexity of Google.

I'd say the same held true at Amazon but I was in groups which were, at the time, at the periphery of the company's engineering efforts - we didn't have any associated principals to talk to, and maybe one SDE3/L6 to 10 SDE2/L5s mixed with SDE1/L4s.

[underdeserver]

I would say* under these definitions L3 is junior; what the industry calls senior is somewhere between L4 and L5. L5s at Google are expected to mentor L3s and L4s but also to design systems, break down into tasks, and coordinate tasks between teams and engineers.

If you were a senior engineer at a 50-person startup you would commonly get hired at L4.

* I left Google 18 months ago; also, Google is a large company, and while they strive for uniformity across teams, the levels aren't really quite the same company-wide.

[senderista]

This is a weird take. L10 IC is VP/Distinguished Engineer.

[I_AM_A_SMURF]

What? Especially at Amazon a Principal engineer (equivalent to Google L6) is a pretty rare beast in some areas of the company. Sure there are some hip orgs with a lot of senior engineers, but in general it's not a common position at all. Isn't L10 a VP at Amazon? Never heard of one doing any real engineering work.

[cperciva]

Principal Engineer is L7 at a Amazon. So if that's the same as a Google L6 I guess the scales are a bit different.

As for L10, that's Distinguished Engineer. I think if they're managers they're also called VPs? I'm not exactly sure what the deal is there; but I know plenty of Amazon L10s who are fantastic engineers.

[lexlash]

https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Google&track=Software... is largely accurate. An L7 at Amazon would have an easy time getting an L6 interview at Google; an L6 at Google would not have an easy time getting an L7 interview at Amazon, barring prior experience and other modifiers.

Of note, The person who wrote this article spent the vast majority of their tenure as a SRE TL/M, from their timeline. That's not going to map cleanly into any career track at Amazon, and when this person tried being an L6 SWE, they transitioned back into management.

At Google, I knew L6/L7/L8 managers who were fantastic engineers; I knew L6/L7/L8 managers who were pure-management and excellent at that but hadn't written code in a decade and change. Varied dramatically by what the org needed - those engineer-managers tended to have a lot of lower-leveled engineers and the pure-managers had more highly leveled engineering reporting to them.

Anyways, while I was at Google, L5 was the lowest level where you could officially have a direct report (not counting interns), so yeah, anything of cross-team note was generally lead by an L6 or higher. (L5s routinely lead things that were critical _inside_ of a given group, but if you were having cross-team impact, well, that's L6 work.)