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Ryan Burgess
Hello, everyone. Welcome to a new episode of the front end happier podcast. at Netflix. Our teams had never had engineering levels, everyone was a senior software engineer. Last year that changed we introduced levels across engineering. Since a lot of companies do have levels we thought it'd be a great topic to discuss on this episode. Let's give introduction of today's panelists. Stacy want to start it off?

Stacy London
Sure. Stacy Linden principal, a front end engineer at Atlassian. Gus is human software engineer

Augustus Yuan
at Twitch,

Jem Young
Jem young engineering manager at Netflix. And

Ryan Burgess
I'm Ryan Burgess. I'm an engineering manager at Netflix in each episode of the front end happier podcast we'd like to choose a keyword that if it's mentioned at all, in the episode, we will all take a drink. And what did we decide today's keyword is? growth, growth growth, which you know, when levels are talked about user growth comes up. So I'm pretty sure we're having some drinks on this one. I mentioned at the top there that, you know, Netflix, we've gone through that we now have levels, Stacy Augustus, do Atlassian and Twitch have levels as well,

Stacy London
they just

Augustus Yuan
yet. So Twitch is owned by Amazon. So we kind of inherited their organizational structure and how they rank and level people. So yeah, so we definitely inherited a lot a lot of those.

Ryan Burgess
Augustus Do you know that if they had levels at Twitch before Amazon purchased twitch?

Augustus Yuan
That's a good question. I think there was a sense of leveling, but not in the sense like so a lot of big tech companies will have like numerical one to five or something like that. And I think Twitch kept it pretty simple before Amazon came in, like they had software engineering Sr. And that was really it. Not I don't think they really had a sense of principle. But honestly, I wasn't there back then. But definitely when Amazon came in, a lot of those processes came up. Yeah, that makes sense.

Stacy London
So yeah, Atlassian has always ever since I started, there's always been multiple levels. They have done some like reassessments over the years to like, add levels or like clarify them. So it starts off with like, and they call them p levels. P 30. For just like engineers, sort of like junior engineer just out of school, new grad. P 40, which is engineer, p 50. Senior Engineer p 60. Principal Engineer, P 70, Senior Principal Engineer p 80. Lead Principal Engineer P 90 Distinguished Engineer. So, there's kind of like, quite a large ladder there. If you if you want to keep going up that far. There are n as you go up, that there's like, like, a lot less people at those levels. Like it's very, I think, quite difficult to get to p 70. Even is like a pretty rare role. So yeah, lots lots of levels. Let's, uh, well, in some ways that's like good or bad. Like, I think it's good because like, if you don't want to switch to people, management, you can still stay like in the technical track for forever, right? If you really want to monitor and keep having something that you could attain, you know, be promoted into

Ryan Burgess
that those are interesting numbers to like, because yeah, like Augustus had said to oftentimes, it's just like, the, like, engineer 45678, whatever, 10. That's interesting that Colossians is a little bit different in that way. What about like, rubrics? Do you have a sense like Stacy and Augustus and gem two, like we can speak to Netflix? Do you have like a rubric to say like, what a P seven D engineer looks like? And like, what that entails? Like, is it fairly clear and obvious for people to understand,

Augustus Yuan
I can start with this, I feel like I'm very familiar with this, because I'm going through the promotion process right now. And this is one of the things that Amazon was really, really good at, they have like, an entire website dedicated to Job leveling, and how you can progress in your career. And they make it very, very clear what each job roles levels responsibilities are. And then also, like, let's say you were trying to get promoted, what are kind of the expectations and they call these like moving to. So each of the job levels have has like a matrix of things that and they have this way of tying to leadership principles that Amazon has. But the expectation when you're moving to a new level, isn't that you fulfill all of them, but you can demonstrate qualities in some of the things in this matrix. So So yeah, that's definitely one thing that Amazon has done really, really? Well. From my perspective,

Ryan Burgess
I like a lot about that to Augustus in the sense that it's like very clear everyone has access to it, that's important too is like, essentially with levels to their, their instructions, like, here's how you move up that ladder of levels. And so that's really helpful to all be on the same page. But I also like that you said for like, promotions, that they're not like, it's not like a checklist like that you have to meet all these criteria. Because that, to me, it means that you're doing the job, like you're perfectly doing the job. And it's like, wait, you still have room to grow in that role? So yeah, that's cool.

Stacy London
Yeah, I guess, um, similar. For at last in each Yeah, each of those levels has criteria in based in categories. So like, like engineering excellence, driving outcomes, leading and inspire having customer impact. There's all these technical proficiency, there's like these categories. And then within those, there's very specific guidance on like, Oh, if you, you know, we're just graduated. And this is your first job, your technical proficiency would be like, you know, you understand modern programming practices. But let's say you're, you know, a principal engineer, it's like, you are using expert, your technical expertise to solve like, difficult problems across teams, not just even like an individual team that you might be a part of. So like, the impact is its scope is bigger. So it's pretty specific, it's sometimes really overwhelming to like, look at the, the entire grid of things that you sort of need to kind of meet. And it's not a checklist, though, I think like, that's something they try and emphasize, like, you're not trying to just check off every single thing. It's like a few of the things from each of the categories. And it helps you to like pick for like for, for growth, cheers, cheers. Maybe pick some picks? Pick something you want to get better at. And that's like, helpful towards like, understanding what promotion looks like as well.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, so similar to Netflix is like we, as we rolled out these levels, there's a bit of a rubric to outline the various levels, we have numbers, I guess I didn't even touch on that we introduced engineering, e three, e four, e five, E six, and E seven. And those are the engineering levels. Which was interesting, too, because we were going from Senior Software Engineers across the board, we did have some technical directors that were very much an engineer. And that was a role. So there was a little bit of leveling for engineers, but there wasn't a lot of that. And it also needed to be clear if if we were doing that, like how, what does it entail to actually move up those levels? And that's where we're at in the stage rolled that out last year. And now it's like working on those promotions to as like, as more people kind of grow in some of these areas. What does that look like?

Jem Young
Yeah, I think we were the Netflix was the last big company in Silicon Valley not to have levels. I mean, I think we might have been the last company in general not to have levels.

Ryan Burgess
I mean, even some of the startups like that I've worked at and things like that. It might even just be like Augustus said, where it's like maybe like software engineers, you know, or junior engineer, Senior Engineer, like that type of leveling or principal, staff. But yeah, there's most companies, do you have it? You're right.

Jem Young
Yeah, it's just a sign of the times, you know, it was interesting rollout, we, you know, a little bumpy, it's a big change to engineering culture to suddenly assign levels. So it was one of the things we a lot of people, I think really enjoyed about Netflix was like everybody's same level, whether it's your first day or your 10th year, your your contributions still, you know, they're still valued exactly the same. So, you know, it's a big cultural shift to kind of continue that mindset where it doesn't matter if you're a new grad, or you're like a principal level engineer, your your opinion matters, your voice matters, things like that. So that's, that's always a tricky balance to strike. And not being too late to hierarchical which I've heard can go. I've heard some companies can go off the rails a bit where it's like, oh, the the level at engineer said this. So that outranks whatever the level 20 engineers or something like that. How do you all is that is that an issue you've seen in the past companies with levels like that kind of hierarchy?

Augustus Yuan
I personally have not seen it yet. But actually, that was like, I really appreciate my manager gave me some advice like he told he told me that when I was coming into Twitch, he's talking about how you know some people on Amazon take leveling very seriously. Like, you know, when you're speaking to now sixth or seventh, like you know, they like really like prepare themselves and stuff and he said to not let The leveling, really take over and redefine, like what you see fit for the role like, you know, you can set your own expectations of what you feel the role is. So, so yeah, I'm sure it definitely happens. But I hope that one like does that actually have a really funny story? So I know five, I guess, but I didn't know I didn't really know about this. And when I joined when I joined Twitch, someone came to me, and they're like, Oh, hi, yeah, I'm the new. I'm just the new l four, which I guess is like, the lowest than typical, lowest level, which I didn't know. So I was like, Oh, my gosh, you know, for it's good to meet you. Pleasure to meet you all for it. He's like, he's like, Wait, what about you? I'm like, Oh, I must be an hour one or something. He's like, Wait, there's no such thing as an Owen. He's like, I think you're a Delphi. Oh. Yeah. I mean, they're just levels right. You know, like, they, I thought they, I was like, hey, got it for me. You told me you were an L. Seven. And, you know, sounds good to me. Right. But you know,

Ryan Burgess
but I think that's the right attitude that you even had, I guess it's like you weren't caught up, like similar to what your manager had given you advice is not getting caught up in that. And that is a fear of having these levels. And if people do almost respect the hierarchy like that can get really messed up where I've already found like, a Netflix like, I think we've always been pretty good about avoiding that hierarchy, where even when we have leadership, right, where you have like, manager, director, VP, CEO, whatever, we've always instilled that everybody's opinion matters, like we want you to speak up. Because even that, like, you know, that L for coming to Augusta's is likely going to catch things that you may not have thought of, or their opinions or what they're sharing is very valid. And you don't want them to like hold back and be like, well, Augustus isn't an L five. So I better listen to him. And it's like, we don't all have the answers. Right? It and so I think that's like important to to remember is that yes, that can be a big negative with levels is that it does form this hierarchy. And I think if you can try and avoid that, where you're just like, no, like, I want to question some of the decisions we're making. I think that goes a long way. And I think that's an important factor of it, too.

Stacy London
Yeah, I was gonna say, I haven't seen too many. I haven't seen that at Atlassian. Yeah, we're like, it's like this weird, power dynamic, like, I'm at this, and you are that I have saved, I haven't seen that, which is nice. Other companies, I have seen some weird stuff like that, where it was like, you know, the architect said, It shall be this way. And then like, you have a whole team of people that are like working day to day on the thing and are saying like, this is not working, and being overridden just because that person's, you know, position and so that that's gross, because then you're just like not building, maybe not using the right stack and the right technical solution, and you're in but you're not listening to people that are working in a day to day and know why it's not working. And that's when it starts, I think it kinda kind of gross. But I haven't I haven't seen that. Mostly, I've seen at least Atlassian. Like, the folks in these various levels, like, they have like the technical proficiency, they're in their day to day like, no one's like abstracted away from the work so far, that they're, you know, making proclamations or saying things without it being kind of backed up by like skills and experience. So that's been good.

Jem Young
The way to think about levels, at least to me is levels are, are not about your technical ability like that, that is an aspect for sure. And it's not even about what you do, it's about the expectations that we should have for you. So if you're a principal engineer, it doesn't mean you're necessarily smarter than everybody else. Well, generally you are if you make principle, you're pretty good. But are you you're really deep on some technology that other people don't know. But it's about how how we expect you to behave, and how we expect you to treat others how do we expect you to, to, like carry the values of the company. And that's to me what levels are all about? Not so much, oh, this person is a really great programmer, because their level, whatever, that is not as relevant, especially it gets to the senior level where you can be a really, really good engineer and just say, You know what, I don't really want to do meetings, I don't really want to drive projects or be that person, or what I really love is coding and solving these hard problems. So I'm going to say at this particular level of Senior Software Engineer, whatever level that is, versus when you move up Like staff, in principle in other titles like that, you do tend to code a little bit less, you are the ones driving these meetings, you're driving much larger cross functional projects. And that's okay. Everybody has their own comfort level. And I think it's important when you think about levels to find that is like, what's your balance? What's what makes you happy and satisfied in your role? But, yeah, coming back to it, it, you have to have expectations, and you have to have managers and directors and etc. Like, hold people accountable for the level that they're at. She's gonna have a really high level, who's talking over people not taking input from more junior engineers, then like, call them out? Call them out in front of everybody? Because like, that's maybe not for everybody. But like, that's something you need to be addressed. Because you are that kind of ambassador at higher levels.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, like what you said, Jem, to all add on to it. It's like, like what you said about the technical, I think, yeah, you are a little more technical as you go. But like, that doesn't become the factor of it. It's more about the impact that you're having and like, so it could be mentorship, it could be leading efforts. But it really is, you're broadening the impact that you have, and not not to me is really what stands out to me. And I liked that you said, hold people accountable to that too. Because you don't just get given this level. And then you're like, Alright, cool, I'm just go back to my like normal, what I was doing, it's like, it is a bit of a role change, like there are different expectations. I'd be curious to hear how you've all maybe seen levels being useful.

Stacy London
I mean, in terms of like, I mean, there's career progression, right. So levels, and companies generally, are associated with career progression, growing your skill sets, and like, and then also different market value and salary and stuff to so that you like the opportunity to move into different pay bands and increase, you know, that that's, you know, a thing that if there is none of the if the if the levels don't exist, and everyone makes the same, like, maybe that's fine, too. But like, that's something that most companies associated like these different levels with different salary ranges as well. Promotions, also, I think, bonus targets and stuff sometimes are get bigger. I guess, to Jem's point, like, sometimes the bonus target is bigger, with a higher role that you have, because in theory, you should be having greater impact than just your let's say, immediate team, therefore, like maybe the bonus targets higher, because you're, you should be having greater impact than just your team.

Augustus Yuan
Yeah, I actually, I kind of want to build on that. So somewhere where I've seen where kind of indirectly has added some benefit, you know, a huge part of promotion is impact. And I've seen, managers work hard to work with other managers to help find opportunities for their reports that they know are trying really hard to move forward in their promotion process. And, you know, for Amazon, I'm sure a lot of other companies have this, when you're building a promotion packet, you want to show that this individual contributor has done X amount of things. And sometimes you can use that as a way to talk to other managers and say, Hey, I have Augustus, he's trying really hard to go for promotion, he's really close. What we really need is for him to lead a project. And this project looks really, really good. And it's a really good way to like kind of help managers prioritize and figure out who can help, who can be the one to lead the project or who can, what resourcing can go where that I've seen that it's helped a lot with those kind of conversations. You know, it's not always really that ambiguous. When it comes like a project comes who should be the one leading it? Who should be the one, just helping out a little? It's definitely helped with those kinds of conversations.

Jem Young
Yeah, it's levels are useful for their useful growth target. Cheers, cheers. Cheers, especially on the maybe the more junior end of your software engineering career, it's really hard to know, how you should behave and what expectations should you start building for yourself as you kind of progress over your, your career as a software engineer. So levels with a rubric, of course, provide a really useful path on what to aim for. Because a lot of the work that you do at a more senior and beyond level isn't always visible to other people. It's not necessarily in the form of pull requests or things like that. It's, you know, meetings and pulling people together and driving things forward where you're not necessarily actually doing any coding yourself. And that's not a lot of high visibility work. It's just a lot of that behind the scenes, but work. So it's helpful as someone a bit newer to have these kind of guideposts along the way to know. Okay, this one takes b, and L for this one, it takes me know, five, etc. So that's helpful. And then on the more, I guess, thinking more like a manager, it's useful for us to set salary events. When we talk about compensation. across the industry compensation is a really tricky thing to get, right? It's kind of it's not exact science. It's half art, half science. But having clear level guidelines along with expectations allow us to calibrate against other companies and the industry as a whole and say like, okay, at at Twitch, this is what a CEO equivalent of an L five does it at our company. So we can like kind of calibrate even though like the titles are usually pretty different across. So those are helpful to when we think about levels.

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, like what you said to like, I think comp is an important one for just like trying to get it a little more focused or like narrowed down to being closer to being right. Another thing I think about is like, the like, equitability across for comp and even like someone's level, is that there's clear expectations that everyone's somewhat following. I'm sure it's not to a tee, because there's always a little bit of nuance there. But the closer that you can get to a tight rubric, it does. It kind of cuts down the bias, it's not perfect, I know it's still there, it's going to be there. But like, I think it gets a little bit better in the sense that you're not just like, oh, that that person is so great, we're gonna make him and pay him so much money, because he did X, Y, and Z. And I value that and it's like, yeah, but as a company, we value these things. And we've agreed upon these as a rubric. And so it does start to kind of cut and reduce some of that bias, which I think is really an important one that I've always thought of levels is a good one. Yeah,

Stacy London
I think that was something that Atlassian was hoping to do with having such a detailed rubric and defining those levels. So in depth was like to try and yeah, take away some of that, that bias of just like making it you know, manager specific how your relationship with that was or how they thought you did and, and like trying to take abstract that away a little bit. And some could argue it's gotten like too far, like sometimes like, the it's so detailed and so difficult that like, you know, some people have complained like, oh, promotions are like arduous and really amazingly difficult to, to get through because there's so many criteria to meet and, and check off and like, good or bad. Like, you know, that's that's something that's come out of that, as people feel like it's like, it's harder to get the promotion than to like, go come in from the outside at that same at that same level, right?

Ryan Burgess
Yeah, no, I think there's a con definitely coming up for around promotions and levels. Like I think that it adds a lot more process to it, right? Like we're, it doesn't, you know, some companies only do it once a year or twice a year or whatever, like their schedules around at some times, not always. But that's now a process that it's already putting steps for you to get promoted. So that can be harder versus you're right, hey, we need an engineer on the team. Well, let's go hire that. And that's a sad level that does kind of feel like a lot faster versus having to go through sometimes the promotion process. So I think that can be a little bit of a challenge around levels like I would call that one. Any other challenges that you all see, like, I think that I feel like there's a lot but not one, the promotion. one's a good one.

Jem Young
A clear one that I think we've all felt in some way is this concept called promotion driven development. And I'm jumping, I'm jumping to one of my picks, but I think this was this was a while ago, maybe two years ago, it was someone on Twitter. And they say like, when you ask yourself, why did a company build seven of kind of the same product? He's like, this is what promotion driven development looks like. And it's, and we see at some of the larger companies where it's like, well, the pm wants a promotion. So they're gonna, they're going to propose some products. Maybe it's a rehashing of an old idea. Maybe it's like, I don't know, some wild wild thought they had. The engineers want to jump on that because the fastest way to get promoted is to have like the high visibility projects in your promotion packet. And then what happens is like everybody's working towards this promotion versus like, betterment of the company, betterment of the product, and it becomes kind of this race to see how what products you can attach yourself that will like boost your your ranking as far as promotion and bonuses and things like that? And like it's like it's very anti consumer. It's it's almost anti company. But they seem to reward that still. So I don't know this this kind of a more of a mixed opinion on it could be good. It could be bad. But yeah, when there's some I forget the actual law, but it's something about like, you know, when the measure, but what's the rule when like the, the measurement becomes the the benchmark or something like that, it seems to be a good measure, something like that, I forget that quote. But it's that's about right, if everybody's angling for a promotion. And that's the measure of how you're going to rake somebody if they're worthy or not, that it's not a good measure anymore. And that's somewhere we can go, you can go really, really wrong, where people just want the high visibility stuff, and no one does the maintenance work, the glue work, the tests, the documentation, the collaboration, the stuff that like you absolutely need, and is really engineering, but it's not seen by others. So people tend not to want to do it. But that's a downside. I've seen of levels in promotion processes,

Ryan Burgess
I think some of those things gem and it should just be in the criteria like that you are writing documentation, you were writing tests like that, that needs to just be baseline, like that's an expectation, because you're right, like, if you're not doing that, like, that's a problem. So, but yeah, we've seen some negatives, where people, they try and get on the high visible project, because that's going to help them be promoted. And, and yeah, I think that we shouldn't incentivize that as companies, even though it happens,

Stacy London
I think it's, it'd be interesting on like, certain, like levels that it would be nice sometimes for them to get more focused on. Like, like front end, if you're doing front end development. If you put more stuff in there about like, thinks about accessibility thinks about, you know, rendering performance thinks about user experience. And if you put that kind of stuff in there, that's like customer focus customer driven, you don't necessarily run into, I think, hopefully, like less problems, where you're just inventing new products to like, get promoted. It's like, it's really like you're focused on like, the kind of thing that you do, but yet, like customer focus, and I think that's like, I think I don't see in the levels defined. And there's stuff about like, doing right by the customer, and blah, blah, blah, but it's not specific enough that I feel like drives like some of the best behavior.

Augustus Yuan
See, I really want to just piggyback off of that, especially since this is a front end, Happy Hour podcast, I'm sure a lot of front end engineers can kind of identify with big tech companies working at big tech companies, they typically will put your job family in the basket of software engineer. And this how you evaluate a software engineer may not be the best way to evaluate a front end engineer. You know, like the, I've taught, I've definitely seen this where, you know, there are sometimes expectations of like, system does system design for like higher levels. And you you may not need to do that, as a front end engineer, like a lot of the work you do may be in the application layer. But there's a lot you need to do there, you know, to optimize rendering performance. There's all these different things you could be optimizing for. And it it's not that it doesn't get recognized. It's just there's not really a criteria in the job leveling matrix that speak to that. So I've seen some big companies, they had to break it out into a different job family, and that sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad. Sometimes it's not good, because maybe that job family has a lower pay band, etc.

Ryan Burgess
That's a good point, too. Yeah. And I think it's not even just front end, there's like software engineering is a lot of things. And but you're right, too, is like, Yeah, that could be a downside to is if if your mobile engineers paid less, which, you know, if I'm just throwing that out there, and that's what you category you fall into. That could be kind of painful. Another one that I was thinking of too, similar to like how we're talking about levels, one that I've seen is externally, like people are trying to get like these levels so that they can brand themselves like on LinkedIn or on their resume for the next job. And that's fine. Like I kind of get it but oftentimes, I don't know that that really is always great either, because you don't have a ton of insight into that person until you really interview them. And so I think there's oftentimes people are just fighting for that next level to go out and get a better offer. And so that can be a bit of a negative too is that people are so driven by that level that they're missing out on, like, what's the impact that you're having on the work that you're actually doing?

Jem Young
Yeah, that external pieces is a good one. Because even even I'd say all across our companies represented here on the podcast, Senior Software Engineer means very different things. Yep. So like you, you say, like, okay, levels, titles, what's the actual benefit there? And that falls on like the hiring manager to be like, okay, Stacy is a principal software engineer. What does that mean? Exactly. And they have to do the research and mean, for being honest, a lot of people won't. But you could be a front engineer with no senior in your title or, or anything. And you could be awesome. You could be absolutely at the senior level. But because you don't have that title, then, you know, you're, you're kind of screwed when it comes to interviews, and like starting salaries, things like that. So that's good. Call out that kind of levels. And titles are not the same across across the board,

Ryan Burgess
or that you might not even you might be at a company that doesn't have levels, right. And so then do you artificially just slap levels on your title? Which I don't know, like, because it you're right, Jen, like you might get ignored just for having front end engineer, when really, you are absolutely senior. But that's just not a level that you have at your company.

Jem Young
Another downside is, and I'm conflating titles and levels a bit here. But I've seen and heard of companies giving you a title, or even a level, but no actual money is involved or even like a bigger scope necessarily. It's like, good job, I guess it's now your patwon level software engineer, you're like, what does that mean? They're like nothing. But it's a feel good title. To make you feel good. Which is promoted

Ryan Burgess
you we promoted your

Jem Young
but there's no there's no money or anything else involved in that promotion, maybe you just have more work. I've seen and heard of that enough, that that's a downside of levels is you know, detaching that from, you know, real world compensation or even bigger scope, things like that

Augustus Yuan
yet. That's why That's why I feel like you shouldn't don't obsess over the titles. And you know, I guess there's some merit to it, where if you're looking for another job, then sure, you can try but like, yeah, I've totally seen. And I hate to say this, because this is happening right now. But during layoffs, I've seen companies like there's most senior engineers left their team. And so to retain employees still start giving promotions, say, hey, you know, you're clearly the most senior person now. We really recognize everything that you do. We can't give you a pay raise. Yes, yet. But hey, you're the most senior that's what you've been wanting. Right? And yeah, to help us fight the good fight or, or something like that. And it's just yeah, it's really unfortunate situation. And, and you have to really ask yourself, does it make you feel that much better now that you're senior?

Ryan Burgess
I think that's one of the biggest messed up things about levels is that or titles, I think, like, I'm going to conflate them, like Jem said, Two is kind of lumped them together, is that we are chasing those like, it's like, it's just like, in everyone kind of like looks at those in those ways, until like what Augustus just said, it's like, so icky. It's like, you're like, oh, cool, I got moved up. You're like, yeah, you have more responsibilities. Now you didn't get any more pay, we just kind of gave you that title. And it's like, at the end of the day, what does it matter? It's like, do you like the work that you're doing? Are you growing, I absolutely think is an important one. Like, I care about growth in myself. Cheers, cheers. There's, but just having a level or title doesn't really it kind of signifies to others that you've grown. But like, it doesn't really matter at the end of the day, as long as you are learning and building up how you are growing as an engineer, or manager or whatever it is. But we get really, hell bent and stuck on these like levels and titles. It's weird.

Stacy London
I wonder, I was going to ask if if any of you have experienced this, I've heard this a decent amount. I've experienced it a little bit that you sometimes as part of like an underrepresented group, you get taken more seriously. If you're if your role is like higher. And not I don't know how to explain it. It's just like, if you introduce yourself as like, senior blah, engineer, and then they're just like, Oh, now I can take you seriously. It's like there's something about that where until the person knew your level, they just assumed you didn't you're not that great or good at something. And I think that's bias and, you know, all the isms that you can think of, but I've heard that the factor for a lot of people. And I actually got there was like a Twitter thread once where people were talking about, like, why are people putting you know, their their title in their Twitter? Bio, and it was well, I was like, well, like I've done it because then, you know, sometimes people actually like will take you more seriously because somehow that matters.

Ryan Burgess
That's a great point, Stacy, it almost carries this weight and can make someone which sucks that they have to feel like that like, but there's nothing wrong with doing that. I did also see that on Twitter, where people were like questioning people with like a PhD doing that. And I'm like, man, if you've got a PhD in software engineering, put it on your like LinkedIn, Twitter, that is badass, good for you. Like, that's awesome. But like, people were hating on that. And it's like, no, that's like, someone's earned that. And so like, that's cool, too. And so yeah, if it helps you show up better or like people take you more seriously, then that's great, like leverage that like, I don't think that's a negative thing.

Stacy London
And it's nice to see. Like, as for me, example is like, it's nice to see, like, under like women in higher engineering positions, because there's a lot fewer of them. So it's like, actually have visibility into that. It's like, oh, cool. Like, there's some, you know, something to look up to or something to? You know, it's possible.

Ryan Burgess
Absolutely. So we talked a lot about levels, what they mean in our companies, and even people may be getting promoted in the company. But what about people coming into a company, maybe what's like one piece of advice that you would give to someone coming to a new company looking at like levels, like we just talked about? We were three companies on this podcast right now, there are varying degrees of levels? What's a engineer that's interviewing across multiple companies? How should they be thinking about levels as they're interviewing,

Augustus Yuan
maybe not so much the leveling aspect, but but it does tie into it. Especially like, whenever I look for opportunities, I want to think happens to be our keyword, I like to talk about the growth opportunities on the team. Cheers, cheers, cheers peak, because that will definitely lend itself to getting you to higher levels if need be. And I think that's like, what's really important, like how it will this team grow, and what is the scope of the team and how those are kind of the things that I kind of look at, and I highly advise people to do, because that's definitely helped me. When I've, like been looking around, and I've been looking at a company, I'll also say that, you know, one of the reasons I left my old company near one was I actually, I actually wanted a company with levels that were very well defined. Because I was a little, I'll be honest, I was a little frustrated, because it wasn't clear how to move up in progress, it felt very wishy washy. And I've seen people just get promoted. And I'll be honest, I don't know how they I don't know why they got promoted, but they just did. And that isn't to say they didn't deserve it. But I just didn't understand. And it was never clear to me what I had to do to get promoted. So that's I think that's like one of the benefits have we of course, we've talked about a lot of the cons, but that is a benefit.

Jem Young
I'd say if you're joining a company with levels before you get to the offer stage, like let's say you clear the interview, and you do well. Before you get to the offer stage, it is really important that you make sure the hiring manager or the recruiter or anybody else involved in that decision making tree understands the the level that you are and level you're coming from, if you have one from your company, share with them. Because you can get Miss level that's a really I hate to say but it's it's a practice companies use by Miss leveling someone or under leveling them to pay them less than they're actually worth. Yeah, that happens a lot, especially to you know, underrepresented people, that's a very, very common practice. So it's really important on for your own sake and pay to make sure they understand the scope and responsibilities that you had at your previous role. And if you can point them to some specific rubric or criteria, that goes a long way, and then make sure you get there as in return. And if there's a mismatch there, if they're like, Hey, you're a level four, and you're like, actually, I was already at this level doing this really well in my last company, I'm actually a sixth on this. And like, you know, push back on them, it's, it's really important you understand kind of where you're at, and it's also vice versa. You know, if you've said you're a senior software engineer, and you've never led a project on your own, you know, I'm gonna question if you're that level coming in, but I'll give you like the the level criteria in kind of that process and say like, Well, based on this, this is why I'm leveling you, but just you know, transfer So across the board and being open with that will really go a long way, when you're when you're joining a company with levels.

Stacy London
Yeah, just sort of like what Jem was saying, if you're kind of aware of what skill sets you bring the experience that you have. Maybe as an example, we were talking earlier about people like wanting to just code and not have broader responsibility, like, maybe you are at a higher level, and you're not enjoying that anymore. That's great. You're aware of that. And then when you go to another company, you can say, you know, I don't want to be this architect level, I want to be, you know, Senior Engineer, because I know that I want to be hands on with code. And it'll, it'll just help you like refine your job search sometimes, because at least even if the job sometimes are different across companies, at least, it can help you find something that you'll be more happier, because you know that that role entails self awareness. I guess it's a good part of that process.

Ryan Burgess
I like that. You guys all have such good advice. It's really hard to follow. I'll maybe add on that just as much as like asking questions and understanding the level and understanding your potential growth. All that is really great. Cheers, I guess. But another thing to add to is like, do your research. There's a lot of this information that we're all talking about of like a lot of the companies that do have levels, they do publish detailed, but yeah, a lot of those things, you can find a lot of information and you should be asking those questions from the recruiter or the hiring manager. Even the team like what level they are asking them like what you know, what are expectations of you? And I think a lot of that is just like making sure to understand what you're signing up. All right, well, in each episode of the front end happier podcasts, we like to choose pics to share with all of you just things that we found interesting and want to share with you all. Stacy you want to start it off

Stacy London
Sure. Get to music picks today the first one is called Wall of sleep by Daniel Avery and hi it's a collab between them every describe it as a cave in which to get lost drawn towards a burning light hopeful steps forward flanked by your favorite people in case hear of Manny de and the returning soaring voice of high. It's a very like multi textural layered songs really good with headphones. The next one is a model of reality, a Sebastian van remix. That's a max Cooper and Cote Khatami song that this one's really interesting that Max Cooper, the label mesh that he runs, they have this discord community where they try and explore the intersection of music and science and art. And so this remix is actually like, he put the song out there and said I want you all to remix it or do whatever, you know, artistic remix of it that you want. And then this guy Sebastian may on who's a musician and visual artist, remix that so he did a video and a sonic remix of it. And that's what this link is. And it's pretty great.

Ryan Burgess
Right on, I guess this what do you have? Yeah,

Augustus Yuan
I have two picks one. My first one is a conference talk at DEF CON 18 called pwned by the owner, by the guy who goes by the screen name size. This is a super famous talk. So maybe most people have seen it. It's about for people who don't know, DEF CON is a hackers conference. And this was a very legendary talk of this guy who had his desktop computer stolen. And he was able to effectively like SSH back into his machine. And he collected enough personal data about the person who stole it, to go to the cops and get a C's search and seizure warrant or in for them to like go and say, Hey, this is my desktop PC. And it's a very, very entertaining talk. So highly recommend and also teaches you the importance of security. And then my next pick is a blog post about Amazon leveling what you need to know, I can neither confirm nor deny whether these are true, but it gives a pretty good background of like what the levels are at Amazon. And not only like the criteria of each level, but also like the moving to criteria. And I encourage you to like when you look at companies like try to look for these kinds of articles about those criteria, because they'll give you kind of a good sense of like, okay, what are the expectations for a specific level, but then what are also the expectations of if I wanted to get promoted, like what do I have to do what what do I have to demonstrate? Yeah, I really encourage you to do that. Right on,

Ryan Burgess
Jem, what do you have?

Jem Young
I've got three picks For us today, my first pick is that that tweet I referenced, which kind of brought this term to, to my mind, and it really made me think about it ever since I read about it, which is that concept of promotion difference well development, and I've, I've linked it to the Twitter, I cannot pronounce the same Gergely or rose, I shouldn't even tried. But I'll link the tweet in the show notes. But it's a really good insight into kind of how leveling in promotion process can go the wrong way. And it's just like good to think about as we think about career, career progression in tech and where we're going next. My second pick is blog posts, by Bart Bronski. It's called the insider guide to tech interviews. I really enjoy because it's it's pretty thorough, but it's not fluff either. It's not like Here are top 10 Tips You know, like the Grifters on Twitter like to like to promote it see it's a really down to earth guide on you know, like what are what are interviewers looking for? How should you behave? What are the questions you should ask things like that. I like it because it's just straight to the point. And my third pick is oddly controversial. Now I don't know how this happened. But you know, America, induction cooking. Apparently, it's become political about gas stoves being bad for you and induction cooking and all that. I don't know how that happened. I don't know. Come on America. We don't have to make everything political. But anyways, I converted from a guest have to from induction because our guests have kind of sucked. We didn't have a hood vent. I also thought it was weird to have combustion inside your house without any sort of ventilation mandated. It's a weird, weird thing. The other science doesn't really make sense. But anyways. Oh man induction cooking so great. It is. Water Boils in like two minutes. And I mean, like a big pot. It's it's so much easier, like the pots heat up, up and down. Like instantly. There's no like, Oh, I gotta wait for it or not. The handles never get hot. Versus gas soaking. You know, you need like a oven mitts to grab your handles because it can heat up the oven the sides as well. Induction like, Man, I wish I'd done it years ago. The downsides are it's super expensive, because you need electrician to run new cables. And induction so have a good one is pretty expensive. But man, I'm never going back. Like I know people swear by gas. But they've never used induction because it's so much better. It's the future and Europe is like already ahead of us. Hope America catches up. And those are my picks

Ryan Burgess
right on I have two picks. One which actually is similar to Augustus is I reference levels dot FYI, I think it's just a really great site to get some insights into what companies do and how they level. It's not perfect, then they they give some information on salary bands and everything. I always kind of noticed that it's not perfect, but it's it's fairly good. And it will give you some information and some insights into companies. Maybe before you're talking to them if you are interviewing with them. So definitely check that one out. And then funny one here is I bought my daughter she's almost two I bought her a toothbrush, and the coolest little toothbrush plays music but also like knows when they're brushing it turns into this like little game. It's quote unquote smart. It's not like it doesn't connect to anything. And it was $10 It's not like the you know, gold toothbrush, that gem actually has toothpaste that you suggested many many times to go for a valley silicon. But yeah, it's really cool. It worked. Like she just like right away. It was like, okay, like brush up and down. And like it was pretty impressive. Like in two minutes of using it. She's honors on her own brushing her teeth. So really cool toothbrush. So if you have kids, I mean, you could use it as an adult. So if you really want to, it was a Baby shark one that I have. So maybe you like that song and want to hear it while you brush your teeth. All right, well, that's all we have on this episode. Thank you all for listening. You can find us on Twitter at @frontendhh you can find this front end happy hour.com Listen to us on whatever you like to listen to podcasts on. Any last words. We should be

Jem Young
like banks and tech and just name ourselves VP like everybody's VPS.

Ryan Burgess
Yes,

Stacy London
yes. Thanks, VP,

Augustus Yuan
Jem.