Is career growth slow at Databricks?
I’m considering an L4 offer at Databricks. I keep hearing that career growth there is much slower than Meta which seems a little non-sequitur… What has your experience been like? What’s the mean time you’ve seen for L4 -> L5 and L5 -> L6? TC at Meta: ~280k L4 Waiting on DB offer details. Will update once I know more.
I am new grad. can you share how you define “career growth”? is it like “scope of work”, project impact? how should I talk to manager about this? thanks
We’ll it’s a bit of everything. As a new grad, career progression is usually focused on becoming an independent engineer and even this can be broken into multiple steps: executing small tasks independently without any handholding, then larger tasks, then a whole well-specified problem, then a new problem that isn’t yet understood and so on. As the scope of the problems you can handle expands, you get promoted and the expectations vary. Some companies have formal expectations per level and documents you can refer to about this stuff. However, at all places you can just talk to your manager about it. Just say I want to understand what it means to grow to the next level, or if you have more specific questions ask those…
You can go from L4 -> L5 in 1-2 years
Thanks! That sounds normal.
You “can” doesn’t mean the average 🙂
Joined from Meta as well. I would not recommend to join at all for L4. We already hired bunch of L5+ last years, and I doubt if there is any room for L5+. We have very different culture from Meta with very top down and micro-management styles. L3 and L4 are totally just coding slaves for L5+.
I joined as L4 and was promoted to L5 in 2y. The max I've seen from L4 to L5 is 3y, but that's super rare. Most people make it in 2 or 2.5y. Growth opportunities are obviously a bit team specific, but changing teams is ridiculously easy if you decide to.
When did you join?
Early 2020.
Congratulations on the offer do you mind sharing the offer details
Should know more tomorrow. They had an offsite for 3 days this week, and recruiter is waiting on VP approval for the offer
I am planning to interview at Databricks as well. How was your overall experience?