Joined maybe 8 months ago. At the time I felt underpaid due to my company’s low performing stock and my Google offer was a lot higher than I expected (~240k for L3). At my previous company I had a lot of responsibilities and ownership, and I felt like I was on a fast track for promos. Here I feel like I haven’t learned anything since joining. It seems all my team does is maintain a legacy system whose codebase is an absolute mess. Most of my days are spent cleaning up legacy code or slowly rolling out experiments to deprecate some old feature. It’s killing me. I asked my manager today if all this would at least help me get promoted and he indicated that it would look good but I’d need to be designing or coding to hit L4. The few projects needing design just go to our senior guys. I’ve been looking for other teams to join but I’m not seeing anything I’m interested in that’s looking for L3s. Really not sure if I should leave Google or try to find a better team, but all the teams Im seeing that need L3s look like the same legacy grunt work :/
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You're learning a valuable life lesson - money != happiness.
I came to the tech industry from the food industry and the mentality there is "show me your work and loyalty and I'll give you a raise" to the tech where its like "I'm not happy with my salary, guess I'll go shop around". It creates an industry that teaches instant gratification instead of hard work and dedication to substantiate such compensation.
Anyway, original commenter is right. It sounds very millennial of you to be expecting seniority in your first few years working professionally. In any other industry you would get laughed out the door. 🤷🏻♂️ But what do I know?
I am experiencing the same in Amazon, sigh.
Hang in there
The 20 part becomes more like 40 as you are trying to impress the other team that does not have headcount.
Google pays you 20% more for 100% more work/competition...They are just lucky that Fed is boosting risk assets for extended period of time and happens to have GOOG rise significantly.
But you have no other alternatives as a digital serf.