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.”
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.
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 your team, "I can't take that ticket because I need to study dynamic programming." You just have to work faster.
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