>Am I that much of an outlier that I need to get with the program?

No! You’re right where you need to be (just not where you want). Many of us have had a ridiculously difficult year.

You’re not alone.

You do live in a different, underprivileged world. Many Google engineers have never not heard back from a job app.

I will never understand people who refuse to work at a big company yet complain about money of all things. For reference my last job at Google paid $450k+. It seems like it would behoove you to enter the other world.

Reality is that different resources have different impacts on an eng. org. Some individuals are eng. orgs onto themselves and can own a whole stack (breadth). Some are very specialized in areas that require deep expertise or experience (depth). Some are good engineers, but lack both breadth and depth of knowledge. Leveling let's you delineate comp bands accordingly.

I've been at three FAANGs now and my experience has been that nobody really cares about your level for day-to-day work. The only times it has ever come up for me is when a) I was part of assembling a new team and we needed a mix of juniors and seniors or b) when some dangerous action like deploying during a holiday code freeze needed approval from an L9+ by policy, so you had to go find that person and justify it to them.

Now, your compensation is based entirely on your level, which obviously makes it matter a great deal, but my experience hasn't been that there are mind games around it.

> this job search is the hardest I have faced in over 30 years. Just talking to a human is almost impossible.

My advice: Don't apply on platforms that are filled with spam. I think the best choice I've made for work is posting on Hacker News that I'm looking for work rather than bothering with job sites like LinkedIn. Both times I've done this, this last time even after being laid off, I had a new position within the month. I've never even gotten replies on any other platform: not on LinkedIn, not on Indeed, not on Upwork... but commenting on Hacker News has gotten me a job in relatively short order, every time.

My personal hypothesis is that employers look here to find interesting people... or at least that's how I'd go about it. Both companies I've joined from HN have been filled with obviously autistic people.

The levels are a real thing, but "navigating the NDA minefield" is not, it's just something Googler's say to make themselves feel more special

> I have never worked anywhere with the L4/L5/whatever crap. No one I have worked with has either. It sounds downright dystopian that people are reduced to a basically a number (if you leave out the L).

This inevitably happens in any large organization. People just have positions like "Department Head" or "Chief Something-Something" instead of numbers.

If anything, engineering/research organizations are unusual because in "traditional" organizations your growth is basically linked to the number of people you direct. In technical orgs, you can be an individual contributor and be at a higher level than many managers.

[dead]