[IncreasePosts]

Building popular software doesn't mean you're a good programmer, especially since at that point Google was looking heavily at CS concepts and he admittedly wasn't good at that.

It's also possible he would have been hired if he applied for L-1. A lot of people get an ego check applying to Google where they're a senior staff engineer or a CTO at a small company and get an L5 offer.

[smsm42]

True but surprisingly grinding leetcode puzzles also doesn't mean you're a good programmer. In fact, in my decades-long now programming career, I've had to take many more decisions of the homebrew kind (e.g. how the thing is going to work, how the API is going to look like, will the users love or hate that feature, etc.) than the leetcode kind. And now I am thinking the former is even more important. If you get the leetcode part wrong, worst thing your code would be slow. Not a good thing but also not a complete disaster - you can come back and optimize later. If you screw up the design and interface part, nobody would be using it - or worse, they'd be using it in ways it wasn't supposed to be used - and then it doesn't matter how fast it is.

[OnlineGladiator]

> True but surprisingly grinding leetcode puzzles also doesn't mean you're a good programmer.

I don't think anybody with a modicum of experience finds this surprising at all.

[zahlman]

Are people who don't work for Google supposed to understand what these levels mean?