Comment by joshuamorton

4 years ago

Up through 7 is defined within the same group for Cloud, afaik, which is almost certainly the relevant portion of the company.

> Plus the folks at that level would be the one defining the goals, so it seems logical that they can't get promoted on that criteria.

Fwiw you start defining goals and L6 (or even 5), that's one of the defining characteristic of 6 vs. 5, you can't get to 6 from execution alone, you need to be setting roadmaps that impact beyond your team. And at 7 and 8, the scope of both people and technology get's larger. A strong-L7/just promo'd L8 would probably be expected to exert direct influence over an organization of around 100 fulltime engineers (caveat: I'm saying this from below, but it fits what I've seen).

Which is to say that the positions in k8s that qualify for L7/L8 promo-worthy work are to a first approximation, just the steering committee. And that looks like it's working as intended: the steering committee is full of people who are Principal or Distinguished (or more in some cases) engineers and manager equivalents from a variety of companies.

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joshuamorton

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webmaven  4 years ago

> Which is to say that the positions in k8s that qualify for L7/L8 promo-worthy work are to a first approximation, just the steering committee.

So you are basically agreeing that an engineer who wants to advance to that level has to go and start a shiny new project (open source or not) so they are, by default, on the steering committee or the equivalent.

  • joshuamorton  4 years ago

    The k8s steering committee is a rotating set of 7 people with elections of 3-4 members every year. You need a sustained record of contributions and leadership to k8s, but no you don't need to have been one of the original creators.

  • UncleMeat  4 years ago

    No. Leadership is not a frozen thing. And leading a tiny nascent project doesn’t have remotely the scope required to hit these levels. It is absolutely not the case that “start greenfield projects” and “grow to 7/8” are connected.

    And yeah, growth to these levels is hard. The expectation at Google is that the majority of engineers never hit 6 in their entire career.