I Left YouTube

How I Left YouTube I remember sitting down in a meeting room hearing the results of my third try at promo cycle trying to get from an L4 to an L5. 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, 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. The results of that meeting? The same from the previous promotion decisions; “it’s unfortunately a no. You don’t have enough impact.” Me when I first joined Google/YouTube levels.fyi Photo bycharlesdeluvio/Unsplash Gemini made - “Telling my manager I’m quitting and both of us are upset about it" That Tuesday afternoon realization kicked off a grueling, educational, and emotionally taxing journey: leaving a "dream job" to find out what I was actually worth in the open market. The Mathematics of Leveling In the software engineering world, we exist on a ladder. We call this ”Leveling”. For those outside the tech industry, imagine the military. You have Lieutenants, Captains, Majors, and Generals. In tech, these are usually denoted as L3 (Entry/Junior), L4 (Mid), L5 (Senior), and L6 (Staff). L1/2 are saved for contractors or interns. After these denominations, one usually switches to a director or someone on the Leadership team. Your level dictates your salary, your stock grants, and most importantly, the scope of problems you are allowed to solve. I found myself in a situation common to many engineers at large organizations. I was operating at a “Senior” or “Staff" level (architecting systems and roadmaps rather than just writing the code and tracking bugs), but my official title and compensation were stuck at just above junior level. I faced a choice: continue to do way more work to prove myself for the lottery that is the promo cycle or leave to find a company that would recognize my output immediately. I chose the latter. And I decided to attempt a "double level" jump during my interviews (L4 to L6). I didn't just want a lateral move; I wanted the title that matched the work I was already doing. levels.fyi The Double Life of the Employed Candidate Hunting for a job is a full-time occupation. Doing so while maintaining high performance at a demanding job like YouTube is a recipe for cognitive fracture. The strain comes from context switching. From 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, I had to care deeply about our quarterly goals and production stability. Then, from 6:00 PM to midnight, I had to care about inverting binary trees and system architecture design. I recall taking "calls" in my car, taking vacation days to practice and do interviews, tethering my laptop to my phone's hotspot to solve coding challenges while squatting in a coffee shop down the street from the office. This duality is exhausting. It forces you to lie by omission to people you respect. You can't tell...

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