> The results of that meeting? The same from the previous promotion decisions; “it’s unfortunately a no. You don’t have enough impact.”

Promotion at Google, as in many places, is tough. Status is allocated partially on level, so it sucks to not see that growth.

Sometimes lack of promotion can be not having the right opportunities.

It's fair to leave a company for whatever reason.

For any other L4->L5s, or anyone wanting to become a senior engineer, it's worth self reflecting on whether there's improvement that can be made from failed promotion attempts.

> people all across the org knew me and said I was indispensable to the company and were surprised that I wasn't already at an L5/6 level.

No one in a large org is indispensable, but many are very valuable. Many L4s are very valuable, but at doing L4 work. It's not a value judgement.

L4->L5 is a step of responsibility: can you be trusted to handle a multi quarter project, without much supervision.

> I helped launch/lead features on YouTube, I led teams, I designed and implemented systems that were still in use to that day by many people

The details aren't clear here, but sometimes an engineer can be leading projects, and need supervision: poor delivery, poor communication, poor outcomes.

"Too little impact" in this context can mean "you needed too much supervision" or "too little impact per $TIME_PERIOD" meaning you can have delivered great technical solutions, but not at the rate or level of independence needed to meet the mark.

Again, not meeting this mark isn't a value statement. It's a different type of work, but it happens to be incentivized with more $$$.

It's also important to understand the makeup of the existing team, and headcount the team has.

If the team is already full of lvl5's/6's, there's not going to be enough senior eng work for a new one, particularly when headcount is being reduced.

The problems of lack of independence are rarely the kind of thing you decide in a big leveling meeting though: Someone working in near the project has to be providing the feedback regarding the employee needing more supervision. If that's the reason someone fails to uplevel, the manager and the dev lead are failing you, or outright saying something different for your packet than they say to your face.

Author here. I like statement. I think the biggest thing here is "not meeting this mark isn't a value statement"

I had a lote of doubt about my own ability because I never got promoted. Was I not doing enough, am I not making impact. But you should never measure yourself by this. I left for more opportunities and more impact. I actually only knew my own value after rounds of external interviewing

All L4s are going to have supervision at Google, whether they “need” it or not. And most managers and tech leads aren’t going to just sit around twiddling their thumbs when no one “needs” supervision. Because most of them are bad at their jobs (I can count the number of good managers I’ve seen in 20 years on one hand).

I would go further and say that the entire system is designed to not promote people. It is there as a barrier to promotion and upward potential. The upward moves are saved completely for the in-crowd people. I'm sure at places like Google it is brutally difficult to move up the ladder at all.