Not only this, as I understand it, T applies to management within engineering as well - director of engineering would be T8/L8. The T designation is probably more paying non-engineers less since employees outside of engineering and product probably get paid substantially less at the same level.

It's more that whatever is common across different job functions, geographic areas and product areas is something you more or less already have to know to be even remotely qualified. Granted, that would be true of all his questions in general.

Ironically a product manager could be a T8, but again you're either a T8 or an L8. Regardless, I'm not sure how this digression, other than illuminating a fundamental misunderstanding you have, is relevant.

So the question of whether someone is "technical" is irrelevant as all L8s are middle managers.

I'm also shocked to learn that back office people in tech companies would possibly make less than people in product.

No, L8 applies across the whole company so it's not an either or but L8 within tech org is sometimes called T8. This isn't a google-specific thing either - most large tech companies operate similarly, though not every place applies the ladder consistently outside of engineering - I'm guessing it originally came from IBM though I could be wrong.

That would be an ironic thing to say given how we ended up on this digression. But I'm always to happy to help others learn. You could've just said your friend is considering a management position so you're expecting advice on that front, but you started this pedantic digression to correct what you thought was a mistake on my part, well for reasons that may be clear to some here.

I hope you now understand how things are but regardless of this point, it's also incorrect to consider engineering middle managers at Google non-technical because you're expected to understand the work at a highly technical level as a middle manager. Larry Page himself is known to work with the most junior engineers on the most minute details - there's a CS-inspired term for this phenomenon which I won't divulge here. I suppose one general thing I could say about middle management at Google is that middle managers are not allowed to shy away from details and use their position as an excuse to do so. It's not a flat organization by any means but it is expected that middle managers be able to function as though it were a flat organization. Larry Page himself at one point thought managers in general were useless and tried to transition every engineering manager back into an IC role. While this itself was wisely prevented, the cultural impact endures, along with the example set by Larry Page himself.

And of course, no, not all middle managers do the same thing - job function matters greatly and the area you work in also matters greatly. Your life as a recruiting director in Copenhagen would have very little to do with the experience of an eng. director in Mountain View working on Google Maps, who would also have a very different life from a product director in Boulder working on cloud platform. While this is already true at every company, it can be more true at Google because the expectations are higher - you have to bring something to the table that's specific to the role, beyond merely general skills as a manager. To the extent that managing people itself is considered a specific skill, it also has to do with mentoring your reports and ensuring their growth, both in terms of skills and overall career development, which of course are very specific to the job function and the area. Even within product, especially in certain specialized areas, growth is dependent on domain-specific knowledge that doesn't translate to other roles.

Furthermore, all of this is even more true if you're an external hire at this level - some roles at this level are more generic than others but the more generic the role is, the more likely that they would've just filled internally. There's no shortage of talent at Google at this level. So the very fact that this role is available externally makes it highly likely that there are specifics about this role that will make the experience unusual relative to a generic middle management role at Google.

It seems you're a bit confused here too but I'd be happy to explain if you have any questions as to what I meant.

As for the L vs T distinction, I think this does a better job of explaining than I did anyhow:

https://www.quora.com/What-are-all-t...l-career-track

cb,

I'm not going to address every conflicting point you've made on the designation side of Google. But suffice to say that colloquially, no one uses L8 to refer to someone with the T8 designation (hence why it exists). Although if you reading a quora answer represents the latest version of your "What i think I know", congrats. You've come a long way from the initial conflation of L8 and T8, along with the weird L8/T8 usage.

Some other things:
1) I thought I said he would be working in AI. For a company that is an AI company (or considers itself to be one), how could you not understand that is obviously a front office/product position? I guess understanding what a business actually does would be a big step to giving advice on the business.
2) I didn't really wanted to address the innate craziness of the position that "Google has all the people that it needs internally so people it hires fail a lot", which is comical. But why do you think they run the events costing 8+ figures to recruit? Beyond the actual cost, they fly in a ton of L10/L11 talent that probably costs the company somewhere between 10k-100k+ per person per day in terms of lost productivity and actual cost. I guess recruiting is still somewhat important at google? (PS: Feel free to actually read that link in more detail for the amount of T8s that are recruited externally if you think there is any question on what we're discussing. I suppose he could be the third in a decade+, seems unlikely tho.)

I do admire the amount of writing you produce. I could never muster that much conflicting and inane content that is entirely off topic. (Again, that whole ramble about location/job description/etc has nothing to do with what I asked beyond the fact that most of your answers were: "He/She should know" and "It depends." which were as useful as expected.)

**** son, you think I have tunnel vision and get single minded!

Then he's not going to be in the tech org? I thought we established that L8s in tech org, including managers, have the T8 designation.

In an "AI" company, saying that someone is going to be working in AI conveys little meaningful information. Also, Google absolutely has tech/AI people working outside of tech org for reasons that may be obvious to people with any kind of experience with large companies. Also I didn't correct you the first time but this isn't an investment bank where the notion of "front office" and "back office" is meaningful, idiomatic or culturally appropriate. The way you explain these things, however, has been revealing from the get-go. Again, I've offered plenty of actual advice but your way of framing the situation makes it difficult to believe that you have any experience with the phenomena being described nor more than superficial experience dealing with the types of people that are considered for such positions. By the way, despite how it may all seem and my naivete and lack of social grace and whatever aside, I'm not that dense - I just like writing for the benefit of others, since some of this may be interesting to some. But in the exceedingly unlikely scenario that you actually have some sort of genuine interest in understanding how things work, I hope you find this helpful.

It would be helpful if you understood what was being said but no that's not what I said.

None of this counts as real money to Google but yes I'm sure Google has areas where it's not good at and doesn't have great people internally for, which I explicitly talked about. And yes, Google, just like every company is also more likely to fail in areas it isn't already good at. This is common sense but sometimes it can be hard to understand. It's also important to understand that at companies this size, a lot of money is spent on things that wouldn't make any sense with a holistic view of the company, which no one does. It's a large complex system that no one has direct control over.

Of course recruiting is important to every growing company.

I too, would be ashamed of my obvious answers but there may have been something in those questions that exceeds the obviousness of my answers.

cb,

You again seem deeply confused. Let me explain this to you again. (I'm trying to use terminology you might understand, but it appears that is a lost cause.) Google frequently recruits technical people (people at one point who did code) at the L7+ level. However, these people are not given a T7+ title (As per my friend, and the link you just provided, citing about a dozen cases in a decade.) Furthermore, within the tech org T designations are used for both technical and non-technical people. Meaning that even within the tech organization you have L and T designations that may or may not mean you have a deep understanding of the technical details of the product that you are working on. How you don't understand this is utterly baffling. Did you read the link that you used? Do you actually know anything about the subject or are you just word bombing your personal HOT TAKES?

Furthermore, I'm not sure what exactly you're suggesting about recruitment since they actively recruit DB people all the time. I guess we can put that on the "things Googlers aren't good at and can't do internally". It seems like you are extremely removed from what is actually being hired at this company and the roles, yet have a ton of opinions about the subject most of which are directly contradicted by things that actually occur. (IE flying thousands of people into recruiting events, some of which are are for L7+ positions in what many people would consider current "core" business.)

I hope you learn something from this and that quora response, as I've gleaned literally nothing useful from what you've posted.

Yeah, you are clearly not S8 yet...

Hey guys,

I have a friend who is interested in accepting an offer from Google. Since they are a massive company everything about the job is easily searchable online, but by having a friend who is going to work there, I can proxy brag through him and get into a bunch of nonsense arguments to increase my perception of my standing in the thread, because knowing someone who has an offer for Google increases my perception of my own self-worth.

So who wants to argue about the internals of Google, because I'm an expert now since my friend might accept this offer.

ll,

I'm pretty sure that my perception in this thread is at an irredeemable bottom. Not sure how literally knowing a person (which may or may not even be true, since this is the lol internet), would reflect on my accomplishments either.

Any specific points of disagreement or just generic lol thremp? (either is fine, whatever makes you happy man)

jesus no idea wtf everyone is talking about in this thread

I mean it just seems like such a blatant troll baiting post in how broad it was and then how you started attacking people for not knowing specific details.

If this was a thread where working inside Google was a major discussion point, then the specifics of: L7/T8/I9/GooglePrototypeScopesWith1080pLEDLCD3DSonyTechnolo gy would surely be interesting.

But a bunch of people arguing about the meaning of Quora posts from longtime Googlers is not my idea of prime Black Friday content.

This post made it obvious before the current Google derail that thremp is really, really bored and needs some entertainment

You have completely backtracked now and you're now attacking your previous position so it seems that at least you've learned something. It probably won't stick though.

Obviously, what do you think was the point of engaging you in the first place? Like hasn't it been obvious since years ago that you're just making stuff up to feel superior to the mere programmers here? Again I was raised by wolves and probably autistic or something in your mind but do you think I bought into your hypothetical here? I'm just using you to talk about things I've wanted to talk about. Do you have any self-awareness? I'm just curious as to what you thought my opinion of you was prior to this latest lol thremp episode.

None of this contradicts anything I've said but it would make sense that you'd think it does.

This was kind of obvious in isolation but even more so given that he tried this exact bait like two years ago in a slightly different context, to insult everyone. His attempt this time also didn't make sense given what he's said back then. I thought I could write some interesting stuff with regard to this but I may have kind of failed. Apologize for being so uninteresting.

It's not you, it's the subject matter.

Long shot but has anyone ran multiple node processes on the same box and have any advice for me? I am in the planning stages of my next game and know that my current DO box can't handle it, but it seems like it should - 1 core, 1 gb ram. Right now all its doing is nginx, 1 node process, and mongo. Cpu is usually in the 25% range, memory 30%. But the one time I tried running a dev environment on that server it blew up/out of memory. I guess just resize to the 3gb tier and run both on the same box? ($5/mo more..) I'm a little gunshy to do that. Next option is $10/month more and 2gb (??) but 2 cores. I have no idea how any of this works I just do javascript.

I've actually been thinking a lot recently about parallel management / technical tracks.

So I'm interested in people's opinions on that (but not the semantics of whatever some organization uses to implement the idea).

In particular, I want to know how successful it is in actually making the technical track equal to the management track. It's a hard thing to do since people in management roles have a lot of innate advantages over people not in management roles.

This link seems to have some useful info:

node.js on multicore machines

hmm yeah didn't think of that. PM2 which I'm already using can feed into multiple cores too. Guess I'll give that a shot. thanks.

It's tough and I'm not sure if it's worth maintaining at the top for companies that aren't effectively also research labs with a huge amount of top technical talent that can sort themselves out. Climbing up the technical ladder can be even more political and it's easy for toxic people to end up there because top people on the tech ladder only have to manage up and can have significant clout without the people management responsibility that keeps them accountable for how their contributions affect others. Also, often their managers or higher-ups who make promotion decisions tend to manage mostly other managers and lack the context to evaluate pure technical people at that level. Another issue that at some level, you have to justify yourself as having organization-wide impact in order to get yourself promoted and having people who are motivated to get some change, any change enacted across the whole organization can have serious negative consequences.

I'm not saying you have to turn Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat into people managers but if you look past just the Googles of the world, the technical ladder at the top of many companies has a lot of these architect types who are neither engaged in product development, nor inventing new stuff, but constantly talking about high-level architectures without having the kind of detailed understanding what would allow them to design effectively at organization scale.

ll,

Well... thanks?

cb,

wrt "Do you have any self-awareness?" this q: prob not. Hope you learned something about external google hiring tho. Not sure how I'm making stuff up. You've made numerous factual inconsistencies with your posts that are just kinda weird.

I'm not superior to programmers. We all have roles. Some get paid more than others. For example, a salaried position of 150k a year seems like AIDS and I was laughed at by someone for suggesting I would consider one for 250k. But w/e. Job titles and pay are completely arbitrary and don't show any degree of competence or ability. So we can agree that my potentially fictional friend is not 5x more valuable than you are to an organization, potentially of course.

Grue,

Honestly, use something like Nakama. There is no reason for you to be running custom ****.

You prob think this is derpy and terrible advice and it may well be terrible. Best of luck. (All their scripting is in Lua btw. But surely an elite engineer as yourself should be able to master some syntax in a couple days.)

jj,

No. Management is a much more demanding and important job than just writing code. (If that is what we're discussing, apologies if not.) It is reflected in pay/titles/reporting. There is really no way to rejoin the two, except in bizarre hybrid roles.

ya this is not so humble brag. or its letting the mask slip.

whatever, bow to u sir.

and really, after rereading, larry nailed it.

mostly I was confused bc usually you are not so transparent.

I think you're referring to the time when I correctly pointed out that a "Director" or a "VP" at an early-stage startup would be closer to 150K in salary than 500K, at which point you countered that 500K is the right number because some such company needs top talent or whatever and compete with Google's Director-level offers because scale something something. I guess scale was sort of your go-to buzzword at the time. It made no sense at the time, but it's especially hilarious in light of your current stance regarding how people at that level are not technical - you were arguing that the startup needs Google Director level talent for technical reasons. A junior engineer (I guess maybe on the lower end of L4, translated to Google's ladder) at a large tech I happened to know just got recruited to become a Director of Engineering at a startup - that's not far from roughly how the talent and levels translate across different types of companies though it's very loose and there are large exceptions. I don't know why you imply that you know how much I make and why you think that matters but this whole act is really embarrassing on multiple fronts. It's also hilarious that you think my pay grade is some kind of a weak spot that you can attack me on and get a rise out of - I get paid way more than I truly deserve, though it's likely I'm getting paid below market in a strict sense. There are lots of junior engineers making 150K that are much better programmers than I am. I'll be alright even I have to cheap out on some PC components lol.