Interviewed for L6 (8yoe), got L5 offer (comp revealed after team matching). I thought the interviews all went well, with only a handful of things I’d have done differently. Mainly articulate my OO design choices, which I thought were valid for the use case I had in mind (which I think differed from the interviewer had in mind). He steered me away from that approach and I didn’t really explain why I went there in the first place. Have you hired any sde3s? Or gotten offers at that level? What’s the expectation?
Yes
It’s probably LP i.e., your experience. Also not very easy to score L6 with 8 yoe despite being good!
L6 has a pretty broad scope--probably a bit broader than the equivalent roles at G/FB. An L6 would be a team tech lead at the very least, and will often be expected to have some technical influence across other teams on top of that (if they're on a siloed team, the most common way of demonstrating that is by being involved in regular org-level design reviews or tech talks, or by driving community projects like tooling). That's the sort of past behavior what interviewers will be looking for. Also, it's tough to land L6 as an outside hire with <10 YoE anyhow; your interview would have to go incredibly well.
Thanks for that insight
Yeah, no worries. TBH the best place to be at Amazon is as a well-paid (top of band) L5 on a small greenfield project team (conversely, it sucks to be an L5 on a dumpster fire ops team--hopefully it'll be more the former). You'll have great WLB and spend most of your time coding and designing with pretty strong creative latitude. An L6 with any significant visibility is going to be pulled in a million different directions (you'll be dragged into countless interviews, for example), and WLB is likely to be bad as you ramp up and build your network of influence.
Design: Everyone craps out. If I lead you somewhere & follow = L5
Whats the offer
Should be able to do LC hard after a bottle of whiskey
Questions were LC medium
Not drunk enough then