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I find it a bit strange when people write about themselves in third person on their own website (see footer and about).

Anyway, the article seems very Amazon centric since I have no idea what an L6 or an L7 is. I get that they’re career ladder steps but that’s it.

And having testimonials about yourself on your own website…

The whole website feels like I clicked on an Ad for a person.



If I’m understanding right, he has a side hustle as a public speaker. So the website is an ad for him.


L6 is a senior engineer - typically effecting change and setting direction within a development team (or small group of related teams)

L7 is a principal engineer - typically effecting change at org level which will impact many teams


Amazon skipping “staff” and jumping straight to “principal” seems like such title inflation


on the contrary it seems like title deflation as Amazon principal engineers typically work at a higher level than staff at most other orgs (at least I remember a Microsoft principal would be basically an Amazon L5-6 level)


Amazon L5 is SDE2. I am not sure how you can equate a Microsoft Principal to Amazon L5. Getting to L6 in Amazon is very easy these days due to title inflation. Managers also know how to rig the system to gather the data points for promotion. There was a time when Amazon promotion bar was high and Amazon SDE3 were considered same as Microsoft Principal. But things have changed now. A fresher needs only 2 promotions to get to L6. Some are getting there in 2-3 years. So Amazon L6 does not have the value that it used to have a decade ago. At Microsoft a fresher will need 6 promotions to reach Principal level. People are reaching principal levels early, but not in 2 years.


Note that these are Amazon's definitions - at many companies L5 is Senior SWE and L6 is usually a lead or a step towards staff engineer.


… wait until you see their HN submission history


[flagged]


Ha, this is true. I thought the post was quite useful beyond getting the author’s name out there.

It can get much more navel-gazing than this, such as the posts by 24yos who insist they finally figured out what life is about after working at a startup for 3 years. :)


That's why I flagged it and encourage you to flag it too. Let's keep this self-aggrandizing slop off of HN.


From the guidelines: Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don't also comment that you did.




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