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
Not enough info to gauge level. The difference between 64 and 66 has nothing to do with YOE and shipping dozens of games doesn’t really speak to your individual impact. In terms of TC, what are your expectations? Could be anywhere from 250k for low 64 up to 500k+ for high 66. Huge range.
Also what level at amazon? That’s a pretty easy barometer most recruiters will use to gauge level here
L6, but it was part of an acquihire, and once I was in and had a sense of what the levels are, I later found out that L7 was off the table for the acquihirees due to how much interview overhead it needed (or so I understand). Otherwise, I think 3 of us could have come in at L7 easily, all old farts that ran our own companies for much of our careers. 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).
Which team/org did you interview with?
Very generally, it's more of a service being built that could use gamedev sensibilities/experience. Sorry for being vague, but I've no idea who reads these things. :)
Did the recruiter share any feedback/hints? It seems that many teams will be interested in your work experience. My 2 cents: try in other teams
Maybe you should've targeted a more product oriented role
That's fair. I was recommended this role by a friend, and it's an interesting one, so I thought it worth checking out.