So are you really arguing that tech companies that pay top of the industry don’t require that you demonstrate that you can handle responsibility that requires you to be able to work at a larger scope, impact and dealing with ambiguity and go through a promotion process with a promo doc?

Are you saying that when you interview for one of those tech companies that they don’t level you according to your past experience?

Yes I know the answers to all of these questions from both personal experience of interviewing and hiring at one BigTech company and ignoring outreach from another’s hiring manager who I had worked with in the past.

(At 51, I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than ever work at a large company again and I am damn sure not going back into an office)

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2 days ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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oh_my_goodness 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

If I'm being honest, I sense some ambivalence about how perfect and rational big companies really are.

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raw_anon_1111 2 days ago | parent [-]

What do you suggest? They just promote people based on tenure?

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oh_my_goodness 2 days ago | parent [-]

You've put a lot of words in my mouth, and I don't know why.

What do I suggest? I suggest that big organizations have pockets of careful, competent folks. But in general a large company tends to be all fouled up. They do a lot of things pretty much randomly. Some stuff happens the way a new graduate has a right to expect, and the way many HN commenters insist it has to go.

But a lot of other shit just ... happens. People get promoted because they have another offer from another fouled-up company, or because the boss thinks they're awesome (but sometimes the boss is dumb), or because they talk the talk exceptionally well, or because they happen to get the attention of someone 2 or 3 levels up, or whatever.

Is any of that controversial? What am I missing here?

Do people not still read Catch-22? Or has it been proved wrong or something? Or take that mysterious cactus that you mentioned in connection with large companies. What's that about? Because the cactus sounds bad.

	▲	raw_anon_1111 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I have only worked for two large companies in my career - both Fortune 10 companies when I worked their - General Electric and Amazon. At GE? Sure things are random. But it was also just another random enterprise company where it really didn’t make sense to work toward a promotion just to make $10-$20K more. You would be better off just getting another job (which I did after 2.5 years). There were no published leveling guidelines or procedures. But I can guarantee you that a random mid level developer is not going to walk up to their manager with a competing offer and be handed a promotion at any of the large tech companies. The manager by themselves can’t determine a promotion. There are promo docs, committees, recommendation requirements. Etc At 51, with just me and my wife, grown kids and already had the big house built in the burbs that sold for twice what we bought it for 8 years earlier and we downsized to a condo one third the size in state tax free Florida, the juice ain’t worth the squeeze. But if I were 22 and had a choice between wallowing in enterprise dev making 90K doing CRUD apps or making $160K out of college and over $200K at 25, I would play the game with the best of them. My own anecdote is that outside of BigTech now, I’m a staff consultant working at a 3rd party AWS consulting company making the same as a 25 year old SA that I mentored when they were an intern at AWS and the first year they came back