What is the bar for a Principal at MS?
Recently interviewed for an L66 role, but I didn't quite make it since I didn't have the backend/service/server/distributed experience that this particular team's role needed.
For this role, I think it's a fair assessment since I have a background of 25 years of shipping dozens of shrink-wrapped (in a few cases, literally) end-products (games), so yeah, I never worked on the more "behind the scenes" kind of stuff and only worked directly on product development.
Does that go under the bar for Principal at MS? Or maybe just this team's need but that I could still make a Principal elsewhere at MS? (I'd hate to think that shipping many games for 25 years would screw up the potential for a career at MS coming in as a Principal. :) )
P.S. They're offering an L64, though, but I think the comp won't come in anywhere near where I aiming based on levels.fyi numbers. Even L65 looks a bit under where I am looking.
YOE: 25
#software #engineering #microsoft #principal #L66
Levels.fyi - Compare career levels across companies
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Though, I am told that if I came in, and it looked like I should be L65, that it would happen fairly quickly. (I don't know how this works at MS, but I know how it works at Amazon, and it takes a fair amount of work at the organization to make that jump to the next level.)
One other question on TC with a lower level - I heard TC exceptions can be made. Is this true, and if so, could an L64 have such a TC exception that it looks more L66-like? It seems like a huge stretch, so surely no, but I'm generally curious how much of a TC jump an exception could make.
In terms of TC, what are your expectations? Could be anywhere from 250k for low 64 up to 500k+ for high 66. Huge range.
My TC expecations are to best an upper-band L6 at Amazon, to encourage jumping ship, so I am looking for low 400s, something that basically "looks like" an L7 at Amazon, otherwise I could just stay at Amazon and just become an L7 (been 3.5 years at Amazon already), but I'm kind of poo-poo on Amazon for all the reasons I see people post on here about. :)
As for individual impact, in earlier days, I had to write entire engines from scratch before middleware was a thing, and since then, I've worked on most systems in gamedev, shipped on almost all platforms since mid-90s, solely ported entire games for many clients. (I was an indie for half of my career, so my impact was more along the lines of what I did for my client, but in many cases that was "developed the whole freakin' product and shipped it to many customers", which may be a different kind of thing than "impacted several teams in a huge company" kind of impact. I find the former more interesting, personally, since I solely created a product that got into 10s/100s of thousands of customer hands, which was large impact for my client's entire company, but it's not the traditional impact FAANG looks for, and probably hard to measure for interviewers that haven't had their own startups).