How I Left Youtube
Key topics
The author of "How I Left YouTube" sparked a lively discussion about the concept of "leveling" in the software engineering world, with some commenters resonating with the idea that this hierarchical structure is limiting. Others chimed in to defend the author's nuanced understanding of the issue, pointing out that the leveling system may vary across companies, but some form of hierarchy is still present. As the debate unfolded, a surprising number of commenters identified as "renegades" who reject the idea of being institutionalized within a corporate ladder, with some even sharing alternative hierarchies, like the French Foreign Legion's ranking system. The thread feels relevant now as it taps into the ongoing conversation about the tech industry's culture and the desire for alternative paths.
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Dec 24, 2025 at 4:54 PM EST
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That bubble is not the world, I exist outside the ladder and I am legion.
Hence the author's "In the software engineering world".
Nothing in author's write-up led me to think he doesn't understand that.
Maybe someone could update it?
I have a hard time staying focused when reading long paragraphs and that includes rereading my own while I write them.
“Nobody drives there anymore. There’s too much traffic.”
Bro these companies can do 13 interviews because people will put up with them.
The little place I work does phone screen, work sample, final interview reference check and we can be done in a week. Nobody wants to work with me bad enough to sit through 13 interviews.
If you're such a rockstar you can probably get shortened loops in good companies through referrals
>This duality is exhausting. It forces you to lie by omission to people you respect. You can't tell your team, "I can't take that ticket because I need to study dynamic programming." You just have to work faster.
Almost seems like the interview theater is intentional, as a way to discourage job hopping.
Police is a protected title but anyone can be a thought police. One can be a spin doctor without any academic acumen. Notice how when qualified, the words take on a broader and sometimes illustrative meaning than when used in isolation. Context matters.
Anyone can call themselves an engineer, even in Oregon, after a Federal Court correctly decided in a case brought by Mats Järlström.
In what insane world does this make any amount of sense?
I'm sure OP is correct that this is a signal for a bad org - but from the outside looking in you'll do anything.
> it suggests they operate on a consensus-based model that stifles autonomy
The one place where I experienced a lot of rounds of interviews (at least 8 interviews, I think) was at the Wikimedia Foundation. It's an organization that is very explicitly built on consensus-based decision making. There were many great things about working there and at first it was very different from typical corporate culture. In some ways it was stifling, at least for someone who isn't a savvy politician. By the time I left in 2021, they had fully adopted the same kind of leveling system as discussed here, with all of the same political and structural constraints on advancement.
I recognize this guy seems to only be dealing with FAANG type companies, but the disconnect from my own reality is so vast it’s hard to reconcile.
I have never worked anywhere with the L4/L5/whatever crap. No one I have worked with has either. It sounds downright dystopian that people are reduced to a basically a number (if you leave out the L).
I am assuming he left the job this year? If so, more disconnect. I am working but looking, and this job search is the hardest I have faced in over 30 years. Just talking to a human is almost impossible. This guy went on a zillion in person interviews? Is he maybe talking about the distant past of two years ago?
The NDA minefield? Maybe I am naive or sheltered, but it’s never came up in interviews and was not something I ever sweated. For the simple reason that there is no secret sauce so magic that I could tell someone in ten minutes in an interview and spill all the beans. But what do I know, maybe YouTube has some secret variable this dude invented I am just too dumb to understand.
I could go on. But the entitlement coming off of this post as I stress about paying bills and keeping my kids in school and fed as I read this on Xmas eve is a lot to take.
Am I that much of an outlier that I need to get with the program? Or is this as out of touch with the current reality as I feel?
Now, your compensation is based entirely on your level, which obviously makes it matter a great deal, but my experience hasn't been that there are mind games around it.
Getting through the interview process used to be so easy back then. I probably applied to 2-3 jobs to get an offer. That has changed drastically since 2023.
Of the places I've worked, none of them had anything where I can now say "I should have stayed there for longer." Amazon and Meta have obnoxious aggressive culture. Microsoft is a place where you can chill out and collect a paycheck and good health insurance. But very boring.
I also worked at some much smaller companies, but not for long. Maybe those are more interesting, but also less stable.
This inevitably happens in any large organization. People just have positions like "Department Head" or "Chief Something-Something" instead of numbers.
If anything, engineering/research organizations are unusual because in "traditional" organizations your growth is basically linked to the number of people you direct. In technical orgs, you can be an individual contributor and be at a higher level than many managers.
I'm interviewing engineers right now, it is tough to judge what their current level mapping is especially if they come from Facebook. You can guesstimate from their resume accomplishments and tenure but the rest is just interview performance or asking directly - there are staff engineers that get there from 3 years out of college and there are seniors that are at that level for a decade.
The article was interesting and much of it rang true, but not this detail.
Most software engineers are not status-seekers, and are not driven by prestige or a big paycheck.
Big tech companies attract the same type of software developers that investment banks do to finance majors, or MBB management consulting firms do to business majors.
Of course, I'm not saying that those are the people that FAANG-companies get exclusively, far from, but you have to...immerse yourself, and drink some kool aid, before you enter that rat race.
Most people will look at leetcode marathons, infinite interview rounds, relocation, etc. and think "absolutely not".
Of course some people are just really sharp, and can almost stumble into these jobs, but most will have to put some real effort into it, and jump through the flaming hoops.
I'm not sure I agree with this one, I think a lot of people are drawn to software because of the money in the same way people are drawn to being a doctor or lawyer - the job itself overlaps with their innate skills and interests __enough__, and there's the promise of good pay on top of that. I think a lot of software engineers would be in other fields if it paid badly.
It’s certainly not apples to apples with any other random tech job to where you can just compare TC while ignoring level of stress. And the money is good but not life changing good.
My advice: Don't apply on platforms that are filled with spam. The best choice I've made is posting on Hacker News that I'm looking for work rather than bothering with job sites like LinkedIn. Both times I've done this, this last time even after being laid off, I had a new position within the month. I've never even gotten replies on any other platform: not on LinkedIn, not on Indeed, not on Upwork... but commenting on Hacker News has gotten me a job in relatively short order, every time.
My personal hypothesis is that employers look here to find interesting people... or at least that's how I'd go about it. Both companies I've joined from HN have been filled with obviously autistic people.
Career is a made up game. There are no true levels or ladders in life that you have to chase. Nobody will care or remember what you did or what level you were given enough timespan. Take the bits that you want (money, skills etc) to live life, but don't get too caught up trying to win the game.
Except for the economics part, it is much more fulfilling to work for a smaller company.
I’m 51, worked at two F10 at the time companies out of my ten jobs and hated them both - GE and 8 years later Amazon. I purposefully made the choice of pursuing a smaller company and ignoring constant outreach from Google (GCP consulting division). But let’s not dismiss the close to $100K diference I could be making than what I make now.
Also a 25 year old SA that I mentored at AWS three years ago is making the same as I am making. They are an L5 (mid level) and I am a staff consultant. They are pre-sales (no commission) and I am implementations.
I went from, if not scraping by, never really recovered from dot-bomb to a pretty good job at a medium-size public company latterly. It was "mostly" good. But the difference in money set me up in a way that I previously really wasn't (even if not top tech levels).
That’s exactly what the author did, and it’s why the leveling piece matters so much.
At big tech companies levels very directly control comp, and less directly control the scope of problems you’re trusted with.
You absolutely can tackle large, high-impact problems as a more junior IC, but it usually means pushing a lot harder to hold onto ownership. Otherwise it’s REAL easy for a more senior IC to step in and quietly take it over.
Though most people into entrepreneurship never go back to big corporations usually.
He was down-leveled to a first level manager at the company you are at? He accepted this? Why? Do you think he / the new company chose wisely? What ended up happening?
He was a great manager, he’s since moved up the ranks but he’s still at the same big tech co.
> It might be nicer to go work for startups, acquire experience there as you build everything from scratch across the whole stack, then get hired at a high responsibility position
You mostly don’t get hired into high responsibility positions at big tech from startups, unless you’re acquired by them directly.
Couldn't have told you what the HR titles were in general.
I didn't know numbers, but I came to know that he was earning X and as I vowed for him to stay he got at least 1.7X
Then I learned how much X was and I got said with my own salary
After a while, I've got a new job and they offered 1.7X for me even after I received a 1.5X increase.
First I was happy that they were at least trying to hold me, but then I realized that my base salary was probably just too low LOL
This is not usually how it works. In fact in my experience, the moment a company becomes a scaleup and brings new leadership in to handle growth, those people start getting rid of the hacky jack of all trades profiles.
Larger companies usually value specialized profiles. They don’t benefit from someone half assing 20 roles, they have the budget to get 20 experts to whole ass one role each.
Career paths in large companies usually have some variation of “I’m the go-to expert for a specific area” as a bullet point somewhere.
To do so, one good way is to hire the experts of that domain that have built it before. That can mean acquiring a small specialized company, or simply hiring its top talent.
You could also repurpose your existing staff, but a big company is unlikely to have a lot of "builders", as most of its staff is just iterating and maintaining things others have built a decade ago. You probably still want to have some of those people in the team anyway, for integration purposes.
And those “entrepreneurs” usually make less than a senior enterprise dev working in a 2nd tier city or a new grad at BigTech.
Source: got paid 180k and took 2 years off.
at that price level as a senior engineer there are plenty jobs available, no stress on that point.
i have little savings but my life is great, my kids love me, my health is good, i work from home and i have time for my friends. honestly everyday is great.
A hella lot people, are you seriously that dense? If there were gladiator fights for 500k, I would be a fucking janitor cleaning up the bloody mess, because of how many people would die for a chance to make 500k extra.
If you think that everyone is the would either agrees with you or is "dense" without doing any sort of cursory investigation on whether the alternate view might actually be common or supported by evidence, I'm honestly not really sure why you're bothering to engage in discussion in the first place.
Since study called “get out of your house and look around” isn’t good enough for you (or maybe you’re already a rich schmuck living among 10 mil houses), here you go:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2208661120
So it sounds like this study is saying people who are unhappy and have low income or are already happy and have high incomes will become a lot happier with more income. The lower end would be consistent with people are are unhappy because of the lack of income, and I don't think would apply very much to people one promotion away from a $500k raise. For the other end, it seems like it would be consistent that people who have high incomes and are happy might be just as likely to become happier from other things instead of more income; maybe they're just people who are naturally happy whenever something good happens regardless of what it is, and because they have high incomes, they don't need to worry about existential life issues most of the time.
In other words, none of this seems to heavily contradict what I said, other than the caveat that if you are already happy, you might still be happier with more income (but we don't know that you might be just as happy from getting a new hobby or spending more time with your family instead of getting promoted). Even without that caveat, it does not seem like your link is nearly enough to make a reasonable argument that I'm dense for happening to cite an effect from an article that, according to your link, was a valid result according to both of the authors.
It might let me actually buy a house too. 300k is not enough to afford anything in bay area.
Even at Netflix who is famous for "all cash, no stock, almost never bonuses": https://www.levels.fyi/companies/netflix/salaries/software-e...
Biggest jump is 400K and that's at L7, for Principal SE, the top level. Below that each level is about a $100-150K jump. Nothing to complain about, to be clear.
Even if you believe they are operating at a very high level of efficiency it is a naïve assumption to make. False positives and false negatives are things that exist in every non-perfect evaluation system.
But you are working backwards
Promotions aren't a popularity contest, but they definitely are a popularity contest.
Oh sweet summer child. How old are you? Genuine question.
But they don’t.
I’ve seen enough people glossed over repeatedly and then when enough people leave and the org is in a less leveraged position, then the promos are no longer an issue. Such BS.
Giving out promotions when people are already working at the level they'd be promoted to is simply a waste of money.
This is the author's biggest mistake. If you voluntarily work on tasks above your pay grade you are signaling to the company that you don't need a promotion.
They're not going to take pity on you, you know, no matter how much you grovel and beg.
The problem the OP faced is that YouTube is optimizing under a short time frame and under the belief that employees are fungible. The latter being a common problem with big orgs, thinking there is no value to institutional knowledge. Yet in reality that is often extremely important
Must be “efficiency” why my coworkers have constant coffee breaks to talk about kids/sport/travel while MRs are open without comments for weeks.
They're not going to take pity on you, you know, no matter how much you grovel and beg. Unless it's a kink. Then hey, you do you, I guess.
I'm about 50 miles outside of Boston/Cambridge and have easy access to all the shopping I care about and even driving into the city for theater etc. isn't an undue burden. Between myself and a couple other neighbors we're on about 75 acres and adjacent to conservation land.
But, basically, while CA is complicated (because of the geography) you can generally get away from walking to things in a city and there are a lot cheaper options in other cases. Lot of exurbs even around generally expensive cities--and even when lots of companies are out there as well.
As empty nesters, at 51 and 50, there is nothing interesting about rural America. I’m in South GA now visiting my parents with my wife. They spend all of the their time between yard work doing things around the house and church. My cousins who still live here and their lives are just as boring - unless they go out of town.
(For what it's worth - I myself am a city guy, but only because that's where I grew up in and have spent all my life. A town of 100k people feels desolate for me on Sunday evening, but I also don't live with family.)
When I was single and younger, my hobbies were teaching fitness classes around the metro area and participating in group charity races with friends. We use to do one every month.
I do find it a tiny bit offensive the idea that kind of thing is boring because it's not your hobby. I live semi rural (not America) and gardening became a hobby, there are garden shows etc.
Everyone has the same amount of time to fill every day. When it comes to "things to do" I don't really see one optional lifestyle as more fulfilling or hollow than another. I could live in a city, which would open more options, more than I could possibly consume, but at the same time it would also constrain my resources so I wouldn't be able to do as much of one thing.. or have a big garden and a studio for painting.
I would be fine here as a married man. But I can’t imagine being single here instead of my two times being a single adult in Atlanta (22-28 and 32 through 35).
I “retired my wife” at 46 halfway so we could travel more (I work remotely) and halfway so she could pursue her hobbies. I would be okay here because most of what I do is on the weekend and there is an airport here that has two flights a day back and forth to the Atlanta Delta hub. She would absolutely hate it.
My resources were far from constrained making even $150K before 2020 living in a 3200 square foot house I had built in the northern burbs of Atlanta for $335K in 2016.
They are a lot less constrained now though making in the low $200s in state tax free Florida living outside of Orlando. That 200K is nothing to brag about in tech. As o said before that’s what a former intern I mentored at AWS is making as a mid level SA
Rural America only has two things - religion and poverty
for example a "senior engineer" at a FAANG has more "value" than lead engineer at a no-name startup.
However the skill gap between a lead engineer of a team of 6 vs a "senior engineer" at FAANG is massive.
a "Senior Engineer" (ie [e|l]5/6 at a faang) makes almost no product decisions. There is a team that makes the GUI, product, marketing, infra, and then a bunch of sub teams that look after the specific part that you are currently dealing with.
Your startup person has to make all those decisions them selves and communicate/delegate it
Being an 6/7 feels like being a teenager with a coddling parent by comparison.
But! the point is this, that name, is all just an illusion. There are plenty of E6s at FAANG that are mediocre, there are plenty of E3s that are leaders.
You must make your own worth. Sure you might be working at a no-name company, but that doesn't mean you can't be _good_. The thing that makes you _good_ at the non-coding skills: People, Architecture, communications.
We still have to do the work to get the decision made without the fun part of just making the decision ourselves.
Sigh
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