[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.)