I've been at three FAANGs now and my experience has been that nobody really cares about your level for day-to-day work. The only times it has ever come up for me is when a) I was part of assembling a new team and we needed a mix of juniors and seniors or b) when some dangerous action like deploying during a holiday code freeze needed approval from an L9+ by policy, so you had to go find that person and justify it to them.

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.

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irishcoffee 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Why did you bounce around faangs if you don’t mind me asking? Reading this site it seems… not uncommon, but I don’t understand why. Finding and starting a new job stinks haha.

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chihuahua 7 hours ago | parent [-]

I bounced from Amazon to Microsoft to Amazon to Microsoft to Facebook. Why? Because the grass is always greener on the other side. Amazon didn't pay enough, Microsoft was too boring, Amazon was too chaotic, and then Facebook paid much more. All bad decisions, but I only know that in hindsight. I'm not very smart.

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irishcoffee 7 hours ago | parent [-]

Oh gosh, I didn’t mean to imply it was poor decision making, I was just curious. You’re a better person than me for putting up with the interview process. I absolutely refuse to grind leetcode problems. My TC at the moment is probably a lot less than what you’ve made though. Always tradeoffs.

	▲	chihuahua an hour ago \| parent [-]
		No worries, I didn't sense any criticism. I've just become more critical of my own decisions, now that I have some perspective and it seems to me that most of what I did was poorly considered. 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.