[carlmr]

>I also have a definition of what I think level should ideally represent: the marginal contribution of a person’s influence on the outcome of a company, relative to the counterfactual situation where that person never worked there, adjusted for a specific threshold of risk tolerance.

Doesn't this tie back to the self-referential nature. If you can convince others of your "level", then you can also affect more change, making the level self-fulfilling, too.

[Xcelerate]

Yeah, I hesitated to mention that as the post was already getting a bit long. I’ve always wondered what would happen if you took a random high performing junior engineer and just immediately gave them control over a large part of the company. Or vice versa—a level 8 engineer pretends to be a junior engineer and joins another company at level 3.

I suspect the degree of comfort and familiarity that people have in these situations has a lot to do with their potential to influence company outcomes. The junior engineer would still have very little impact when immediately given a VP role and likely proxy their decision-making through others at that level, but they would learn to adapt much quicker than someone going slowly from level 3 to 4 to 5, etc. (assuming the pressure didn’t cause them to quit). There’s a reason people say joining a startup accelerates career growth at the next company.

On the other hand, the level 8 engineer would immediately get themselves invited to discussions at a higher level, because they already have the social skills required to interact in those meetings. It’s not that most junior engineers can’t set up these meetings on others’ calendars—it’s that they don’t want to because they know they’ll stand out like a sore thumb in the discussions.

There’s definitely an element of luck involved with being in the right situations so you have the opportunity to make a larger impact, and once you do, you’re more comfortable with putting yourself in situations where you can do that again. So it is self-fulfilling in a sense. But there’s also a personality component, as more ambitious people (at least within the context of a corporate environment) are willing to take on more risk of embarrassing themselves by potentially failing at a higher level.

[yobbo]

Hypothetically, anything can happen.

A "senior" cosplaying as junior can easily turn into conflict and deadlock when people feel their toes being stepped on by someone beneath them.

A junior cosplaying as senior reflects a situation with nepotism or favouritism. They are typically routed-around, quietly, by the people with relevant competence and jobs to do.

Real believable seniority is actually important in eliminating friction.

[thehappyfellow]

I think you are basically right, in many organisations you get a lot of influence based on your title and not on your skill.

[baq]

Skill is hard to verify. Title is used as an easy to verify proxy by design. It's a feature.

How the feature is implemented in different organizations... is a different topic entirely.

[thehappyfellow]

I get that, but even if titles were an amazing proxy for skill, that will only correlate with some subset of skills and say nothing about the rest (e.g. some staff engineers are amazing technically and only pretty good as team leads or vice versa). Even assuming that title correlates well with some notion of skill, there are organisations which won’t allow someone with Fancy Title to make a decision requiring skill C if they’re bad at it - and some would have no way of stopping them.

[axus]

The word "title" makes me think of noble titles. Hard to earn, but easy to hang on to.