Org levels and why they are useful

[I half-wrote this post months ago when I was deep in thinking about staffing decisions. Posting it now cause, well, it was half-written]

When talking about staffing, the words “senior” and “junior” gets thrown around a lot. By nature, these are subjective and ambiguous terms. They also cause a lot of angst because they imply some sort of classism, usually displayed in the form of “if you’re not senior enough, your opinion doesn’t count.” That’s an example of the labels applied badly. However, level differences between people in roles are real and ignoring them doesn’t really help anyone.

When staffing a project or an organization, it’s important to have a clearly understood taxonomy for levels. Without such a thing, it’s hard to clearly define staffing direction.

Firstly, an aside on Levels vs Performance

Before going further, it’s important to point out that a “level” does not map directly to one’s ability to perform on a specific project or team.

Of particular note, having a “high level” certainly doesn’t mean one’s ideas are automatically “better” or “more right” than someone more junior. In fact, while at Google, if I ever heard anyone dismiss another person “because they were a <fill in level here>” or something asinine like that (thankfully this happened extremely rarely in my ~9 years) it’d immediately flip my bozo bit for whomever said it.

Fundamentally the idea of a “level” is a one-dimensional rating of a human’s ability at a role. That necessarily loses a lot of information.

It’s obviously a concept with many flaws.

Picking apart its flaws isn’t super interesting; there are too many of them. A better question what use can be extracted from the level?

What does a level represent and how are they used?

It’s a fuzzy concept. To me, a level represents “mindset maturity” which usually is a combination of being able to influence and being able to see hazards.

There are 2 major uses for talking about levels.

1. It provides a really fast shorthand for talking about an employee‘s independence and leadership skills.
2. It lets you one analyze a population for particular characteristics.

The distinction between population and individual in point (2) is critical. If you have a well understood task and you know individuals that you may assign to that task well, there’s no need to talk about levels. The specific knowledge of task and individual traits overshadows anything a level label can give you.

However if you are looking at a workforce population of even medium size (read: >5 people), access to that sort of specific information is diminished. Levels as a coarse grained characterization tool can be useful for guiding staffing decisions.

This is very abstract. Can we get a concrete example of levels?

Since most of my career has been at Google as a software engineer, I’m most familiar with their engineering taxonomy. Here is the ranks I have experience working with:

• Software Engineer II (aka T3/L3)
• Software Engineer III (aka T4/L4)
• Senior Engineer (aka T5/L5)
• Staff Engineer (aka T6/L6)
• Senior Staff Engineer (aka T7/L7)

What do those mean and how do you know which level you are in? Here’s is a cute little rubric that I stole from somewhere (and modified a bit). For each level, the characteristic thinking pattern is:

• T3 — How do I do this?
• T4 — I can do this.
• T5 — We should do things like this.
• T6 — We all will stop distracting ourselves with things like this.
• T7 — The world would be better if we did this. Here’s how we’re getting there.

What you see are 2 transitions: (a) individual focus to group focus and (b) seeing the right path to ensuring that others take the right path.

At Google T6 was a breakpoint when one’s role switched from just worrying about task success to analyzing project/organization/business success and forcing decisions that ensure success occurs. At >= T6, “I gave my opinion so I’m done” doesn’t cut it anymore.

How to use this in staffing decisions?

I find this most useful when thinking about debugging team dysfunction via augmentation of staffing.

If you have a team that’s really good at executing but consistently chooses the wrong problems, you probably need to add T6 or T7 drive focus or direction.

If you have a team that’s great at identifying problems and making initial headway, but doesn’t make fast progress or doesn’t complete, you may want to augment with Some T4 or T5.

T3 is entry level. Adding someone at that level doesn’t lead to immediate gains. If you take on an entry level team member, you are making 2 bets: (a) they will have a high development trajectory to other levels (b) they will provide development opportunities for leadership and mentorship skills of other team members.

One of my interview candidates put it best: good teams often have level diversity. If you are a manager, being intentional with the level diversity can be a powerful thing.

Why not always hire the highest level?

This falls in to the “team of the best people fallacy.”

First off, levels are only one dimension to look at. There’s all sorts of other dimensions (culture fit, domain expertise, experience, etc) that matter first. However, even assuming all that is equal, people work optimally when they are placed in a position that matches their current mode of thinking.

You cannot put a T7 in a T4 or T5 position for very long. They will get bored. That boredom will lead to some thrashing and that thrashing (particularly combined with the implied leadership skills at that level) can cause a loss of focus.

In the worst case this can manifest as a “too many cooks in the kitchen” problem where multiple strong leaders with different opinions use their leadership skills to fragment a group. Even if everyone knows NOT to get into a leadership fight, it’s very hard to shut off one’s skills at influencing. A strong leader’s unease with direction will almost always leak out and accidentally fragment a group, no matter how much they might try to hide it.

Even if you can avoid the group fragmentation problem, T7s will usually notice a problem that they think is important and take the liberty to go solve it. Part of having a higher level is trusting your own judgement enough to take action. This has an opportunity cost that a T5 in the same role would not necessarily pay. Thus, it’s quite possible that having the T5 instead of a T7 would lead to faster execution.

Does experience equal level?

No. Experience is correlated, but it is not at all the same thing.

Though it is very rare to find someone with no experience that operates with the interpersonal skills and clarity of vision that’s characteristic of a high level, I’ve seen it.

What is very common though is people who have loads of experience but for whatever reason (lack of opportunity, lack of mentorship, lack of innate talent, who knows) get stuck somewhere on the development scale.

How do these relate to pay grades?

This is a tricky topic.

Conceptually, compensation and levels are different axes. Compensation is, abstractly, a negotiated fair payment for your work. Level is a description of your maturity. There is a correlation between higher level and general ability to make oneself effective…but it’s just a correlation.

To further complicate things, many orgs have no distinction between pay and level. It’s worse when role gets conflated with that too. Federal government seems to be one such org where all three of these things are tangled together.

Roles, Levels, and Pay are all super touchy topics for people. I think conflating them more than necessary is mostly only destructive.

What goes wrong with levels?

The main problem I’ve seen with levels are

1. Inappropriate level labels causing harm to self-worth of employees (either the mislabeled employee themselves or others that notice the mislabeling).
2. Forgetting that levels are most useful at a population analysis level, not an individual analysis level.

People at Google hated the perf and promo process. I never liked it much myself either. However, I always put a lot of care into it because mislabeling someone (either by promoting too early, or worse…promoting too late) could cause lots of organizational harm.

In the best case, the single employee becomes disaffected and quits due to the incorrect label. In the worst cause, the incorrect label affects everyone else’s expectation about what to expect from a level. (OMG, that person is a only a L5? But they do all this stuff! I must suck.)

Closing thoughts

I mostly wrote this because I realized that having left Google, I no longer had a well defined taxonomy for characterizing staffing decisions.

I guess my main thought is, it doesn’t matter too much what your taxonomy is, as long there is one and that it’s well understood.

Also, though bucketing people is an uncomfortable task, it’s not helpful to just sweep such labels under the carpet. If you don’t create a taxonomy, an informal one will appear, probably in the form of “We want 5 more Pats, and not as many Leslies.” This, ultimately, will be less precise and more biased.