Leaving Google
Why did he leave? The tl&#x27;dr is the L6 glass ceiling and the remote pay cut. I can speak to both of those:<p>First, for those that don&#x27;t know, new grads get hired at L3, PhDs at L4 (which IMHO is actually a mistake but that&#x27;s another issue) and there is an expectation of getting promoted to L5 (Senior Software Engineer). There&#x27;s no set time frame for this. I&#x27;ve known people who stayed L4 for many years and were quite happy. L6+ start to require increasingly extraordinary influence and technical contribution.<p>&gt; It&#x27;s hard to get promoted beyond L5 for open source work<p>I&#x27;ll clue you in on a dirty little secret: it&#x27;s hard to get promoted to L6 for <i>anything</i>. This is by design. It&#x27;s how the company controls costs and maintain retention (by dangling that L6 promotion, possibly for years).<p>One of the things that Ruth Porat did when she became CFO is lowered the promotion target percentage. This meant less people got promoted at each cycle.<p>How promotions work is a committee of higher-level engineers (eg L7s consider promotions to L6) and will have 10-15 packets to assess. These will get stack ranked by the committee. If you&#x27;re above the line you&#x27;ll get promoted. If you&#x27;re not, you won&#x27;t. Ruth&#x27;s change just made that line a little higher.<p>As for the pay cut, this requires some context. By the time you reach L5+ the majority of your total compensation comes from equity, both your initial grant (for the first 4 years) and annual refreshes and discretionary grants you get along the way. So less than 50% of your income comes from salary plus bonus.<p>For those employees who go permanent remote, there is a location-based pay adjustment. SF and NYC are at 100% rate. Other areas at 85-95% of that.<p>That only applies to the salary plus bonus (since bonus is derived from salary) part of your total compensation. So a 10% cut for L5+ is in reality &lt;5%. You don&#x27;t save on taxes by moving to San Diego but it is cheaper than the Bay Area. If you move to a no-state income tax state however your net pay can in fact be higher.<p>So, the argument for no pay cut is you&#x27;re saving the company money by not having to pay for office space, a desk (etc), free food and so on, all while doing the same job. This seems to be the author&#x27;s position and I&#x27;m certainly sympathetic.<p>The argument for a pay cut is that your compensation isn&#x27;t really associated with your output at all and is entirely market-based. For many people not going into the office and being able to live somewhere that isn&#x27;t the Bay Area is a huge plus so people are willing to give up something for that. Plus you could argue the company doesn&#x27;t want people going remote who don&#x27;t really want to by offering the same pay. By lowering your pay slightly it creates a psychological barrier such that only people who really want to do it do so. I&#x27;m sympathetic to that argument too.