A layoff fundamentally changed how I perceive work

And these are the biggest employers of talent. It may not be most people in a startup forum, but it’s a lot of people.

For all others, I think it’s because tech isn’t seen as such an important revenue driver. Lots of places we are still seen as a cost center.

You're misinterpreting the data, because you can't see for data points on levels.fyi whether they obtained their reported salary by being promoted within the company or by doing the very common "side-promotion" of getting hired at a higher level at a competitor.

I was young and naive and unwilling to play the company hopping game, I got promoted from L3 to L6 at Google, after a year and a half at L6 I was paid in base salary less than some of my colleagues who got recently hired at L5 and negotiated well, plus they got significantly higher stock grants as part of their signing bonus (like, around 2x what I was getting through standard yearly grant refreshes).

In my experience, you’re better off getting the promo and looking for the next job at your leisure. It sucks that that is what the system rewards, but I certainly don’t fault people for playing the game that is given.

Commensurate to the risk, of course. If you ignore the risk component then your best bet is to forget having a job and spend your days playing Powerball. The system offers much, much, much greater reward there.

If you keep risk in mind then it's not so clear cut. Staying at the job you have, even with lower pay on paper, may end up being the most profitable option in the end. But sometimes you just have to make the gamble and find out! There are winning opportunities for sure.

It's also the only way I have ever gotten a significant increase in compensation, responsibility, and title.

Also since COVID, they've been very aggressively squishing the pay bands.

you know what has NOT gone up 10x in the decade I've been working in this industry? MY SALARY

we all deserve a significant pay raise you scab

If it's not your dream job or it truly is the best comp in your area, you need to be very careful with promotion tracks and have a plan to keep poking the people involved. But all that already means it may not be a good fit of a company who cares about growth anyway, so...

In bad times like this, probably not worth it. The search takes months not, if not over a year, and there's a non-zero chance you're laid off anyway.

Companies have low friction firing you to get someone cheaper. Will you have low friction firing your company to get more expensive?

I realized that it would be my competitive advantage as everything else got commoditized and outsourced.

I went from the second highest tech IC at a 100 person startup setting the direction of the overall architecture, to a mid level cloud consultant at BigTech (full time, direct hire), to a “staff” level at a smaller company (same responsibilities as a senior at BigTech).

Funny enough, the company that acquired the startup pre-BigTech offered me a staff position responsible for strategy over all of their acquisitions 3 years later.

My next play if I cared about comp, would be to go back to BigTech as a senior or a smaller company as a director/CTO.

Staying put isn't risk-free either. Not by any stretch. But is comparatively less risky. It is the devil you know, hence the lower risk premium.

Ok.

> Is that work something that anyone else could do?

Maybe not anyone else, but someone else, sure.

But here is the real point. In order to get promoted you have to be selfish. You have to shirk doing the work that isn't perceived as creating the highest value, and leave it to some other sucker. If no-one did that work, what then? It's not like plumbing fields around SBE messages is difficult, or writing some additional business logic is difficult. And the same goes for running some performance tuning, and shaving a few micros here and there. Any developer on our teams can do either task. But the person who can prove that they shaved a few micros off tick to trade latency and made us a bunch of money is going to get noticed a lot more than the poor sucker who plumbed in a few fields to allow risk team to monitor things more carefully.

Almost all work that moves the company forward is valuable. Some just has greater perceivable value, and results in the higher reward.

We've all been through this, we know how it works.

I work in finance. We have a lot of regulatory requirements. Assume some boring regulatory requirement comes in that all of your agorithmic trading on electronic venues needs to stamp an algorithm id on each message to the venue (this was a real thing). Someone has to do a huge amount of boring work aligning everything to do this, and in the end, there is little visible value creation from this work, and you're not going to be rewarded for doing it (people weren't). But without it, your business will cease to function entirely.

The problem is the stakeholders controlling reward are far from perfect. They will judge this project against a project that tweaked the algorithms for better performance (as I already alluded to) and reward the latter, because it made dollar sign go up.

So basically you end up in a shark tank where developers are acting selfishly, desperately trying to get their name attached to the correct projects, and the loudest voices win.

The value of a quiet, but excellent developer, who writes correct code, doesn't introduce stupid complexity, makes the right decisions for the future, even if it takes longer, is very high. But that value isn't easily visible and I'd argue this is rife across the every industry that employs developers, not just big finance.

This is an uncharitable response, no need for that.

An investor risks their post tax capital, and then when it works like google gets the upside and when it fails they get...shares in blackberry or IBM.

An employee risks their time, which they are guaranteed by law at least for the time they risk, to be compensated in cash and benefits.

An employee also risks their reputation and career opportunity cost for which they get...checks notes...options that go up/down the same as an investor.

An employee is participating in both value buckets, and one might argue at Google specifically, in the most compensatory bucket proportion in the history of all people ever.

The people who get raises take active steps to obtain them. Typically that means pushing, or getting a new job. The reality is that life is not fair and corporate America is not a meritocracy.