L6 staff at google- AMA

My NW would be around 9-10cr. Nope same PA throughout

Just a doubt retire kyu nahi hote ? , or do something very interested in ?

1. it was all zirp. We hired too many people and you need people to lead them. Now we are reducing hc and don’t need as many people. So we don’t need as many seniors folks. It will stabilise over time
2. I am still at google and no plan to leave anytime soon. Unless fired :)

It depends on what you want to do. So I can’t answer that for you. I can try to answer what all options provide you

1. staying in a start up: staying in a startup accelerates your ability to solve problems faster. However you don’t always become the best engineer as velocity is more important than maintenance and other concerns.
2. if you don’t want to remain technical, you can do MBA. There are better ways to do this by trying out product roles but MBA might be faster
3. MS is generally useless. Only two things for which you should do MS: 1) you are finding it hard to crack product companies in India and have money to do MS and long term want to settle outside. 2) you want to see if you can do phd but don’t know if you can survive 5 years. MS is pretty useless outside of these.

I think my biggest learning is to not have a short term view of your career. Lot of people optimise for short term wins and lose long term view. Simple example an infrastructure engineer doesn’t want to work on a client feature cz they would need to ramp up and that would delay their promotion to l4/l5 let’s say. But you will find it infinitely more difficult to get promoted to l6 if you were just a back end engineer all your career

I was pitched L5 interview couple of years ago which I didn't take for personal reasons. Since then, I have been leading a project with 2 SDE1s in my company. I have total 7 years of experience. Will Google me for L6 role?

Late 70s. L3->l4: 1.5 years l4-l5: 3.5 years l5->l6: 3 years

I am joining as L4 and being offered a base of 34 L , and ESOPs. Would you say it's a good comp? or I got lowballed.

Horrible :) I never did leetcoding

That's the biggest lie people say. There are people getting into top companies who claim they have leetcode count of <50 when in reality they have surely done some kind of competitive coding or questions on other platform. Please prove me wrong by telling your interview experience. Please don't say you don't remember because my friends who are in Tier 1 company remember every single questions they were asked in interview because it's a big thing to get into such companies and a life long memory. Atleast you could recall the process.

1. straight out of college. Via college coding contests that google used to do. Idk I still have major imposter syndrome. And I don’t think it ever really goes away
2. skills are important. I think your biggest moat is the trust you have built over the years in your org. You can do that overnight even if you have the skills

Which college did you study in?

Answer depends on the team and manager. I don’t think there is a one size fits all ratio. And I don’t necessarily think it matters that much tbh. A good engineer should be able to do product work as well as work with their managers to grow themselves irrespective of the bandwidth of the said manager

Daily :) but I have started to realise it’s just a job. We as humans attach a lot of self worth to out jobs and when things don’t work out we feel like a failure. I am not the best at this but I m learning :)

True that master shifu, bdw Have you explicitly switched internally? (Re-orgs don't count) during your tenure so far.

Idk tbh. I am not from IT and I am not involved in hiring. I would suggest start doing smaller projects and/or get an internship. Then leetcode etc should also help. But your aim should be to First get interview calls