Concluded an onsite last tuesday for a TL role at L5. Went very well. Was optimistically pondering about upcoming negotiations and if there might be room to negotiate a L6 and what evidence to present for my case. Any ex or current #google can comment? 200TC/11YOE
Getting from L5 to L6 is not easy and requires significant contributions. Google is a show-me type company and you will have to prove that you can perform at L6 to be promoted. In short, no.
Almost no chance.
If you feel you are L7, you will get L6 offer. Internally, promote to L6 means you are a TL of 8-12 eng on an impactful project with continuos innovation and improvement (a friend of mine who leads a team of 10 on a project everyone in tech knows and all google products use tried twice for promo), a reliable member of director's reportees (vp visibility and director's strong support is minimum requirement), expect 1 or 2 year struggle and uncertainty(project cancel despite good progress, reorg, priority of corp strategy shifts, or other shitty reasons like inconsistency, need more tenure, do what you are doing you will eventually get it) to go through promo committees. Even harder for researchers, goodfellew is L6 after rehire, quoc le is L7. The most cited researcher of sentiment NLP, and the most cited reseacher of context aware are L6. This is why I don't want to waste my time here, clearly I'm not as smart as them but I could get faster career growth in other companies
What company are you at now?
Bar for L6 is substantially higher. 5->6 is the toughest promo. If you are confident you can perform at L6, there is no loss (and it's much safer) in getting hired at L5, stun your manager with your work and go for promo at the first cycle claiming bad slotting.
Bar for 6 is high. However, if you can get in at 6, do it. The reality is that getting to 6 is much more than how well you do, but also which team you're on and other circumstances
Go for promo at first cycle? Yeah right... I thought so too when I was hired at T5 with very good interview packet and T6 equivalent at previous company. When I mentioned it to my manger during our first 1:1 they basically laughed at me and said I have to wait at least few years before I can go for promo.
You can’t negotiate L6. It’s based solely on the combination of interview performance and previous accomplishments. What you can do is offer to come in again to interview for L6 signals. They should be happy to set you up with a combination of L6 and L7 engineers to assess your fitness to be hired at L6.
can you please elaborate on what the L6 signals are?
I started at L4. It took me a year to get promo to L5 and then 2.5 years to get to L6 where I still am 3 years later. Obviously I can only speak from my experience but since a lot of the "requirement" for my promo was demonstrating an in depth knowledge of my PA I doubt anyone could join at L6. Conversely a lot of the L5 stuff on my job ladder is about how well you work with other people and cross-team stuff and not so much the technical stuff. So an L5 offer implies to me "run this team, learn how Google does stuff and then get a Promo to L6".
One year to L5 is super fast, did you bring domain knowledge to the team?
Yes. I'm not going to say what I do because it gives too much away but Google wasn't my first job in a FAANG company and I entered the world of having a job when a lot of my colleagues still hadn't been born! But my point to the OP and anyone else reading was that s/he probably is an L6 but you need to demonstrate it. I learned a lot of stuff I didn't know in my first year at Google and I'm still learning to this day.
I know people who make $200k tc with < 1yoe...how do they pay that at MS?
Actually forgot to add stocks. 200 reflects base + bonus.