My recruiter told me that at Pinterest new grads get levelled at both L3 and L4 based on their interview performance and past experience. There's no system design portion, so I have no idea how that works. Could someone from Pinterest fill me in? Or was that just a lie that some new grads (bachelor's) get levelled to L4.
I think it's highly unlikely that a new grad with a bachelor's would get L4 without also having a few years of real industry experience (not just internships or hobby projects). If you're 21-22 and fresh out of undergrad, that's L3. PhD with little or no industry experience is typically L4. I was on an interview set for a new grad PhD matching that description not that long ago. He's coming in at L4, and there was an architecture component. Where it starts getting weird is the people who come in at L5 and up, because those bands are really wide.
I know PhDs who went in as L4, not sure about bachelor's. There was a system design question.
Yeah that would make sense to me that PhDs would get levelled to 4 they do the same thing at Uber and Amazon.