Kelsey Hightower

So from three to four, four to five is a little formulaic.

You have a ladder, there are things that are expected of you, and the decision making on those type of promotions are localized, meaning your manager, maybe a director.

But then outside of that, though, when you start to go higher, it's now expanded where there's now other teams that have to understand your impact in a way that can't be biased by a local team.

So if you think you've made a lot of impact and then people across the org do not agree, that allows you to really throttle what impact means, right?

Because if it's just your team, I really like this person.

Now everyone is a distinguished engineer.

And so I think Google did a really good job of saying, look, it was okay to be like L5 or 6 for your entire career.

Exactly.

And I think for a lot of people, you can follow the formula and get to where you need to be.

But I was like, at the time, I think there was like a couple hundred distinguished engineers.

So as an entrepreneur, if you show me the top of the mountain,

Yeah, and I guess the only thing I would probably add to the moment or to the situation was I wanted to do it authentically.

And so there was one part of the time, I remember I didn't get one of the promotions, but I was getting promoted pretty fast.

So of course people were like, dude, you need to actually make an impact before you get promoted again, stop it.

And that was good feedback.

But I remember I took a chance.

So there's a pattern to doing a promotion packet.

like structure, there's examples and you go through all of this stuff and you get feedback.

I remember one year I was like, I'm not doing that.

This year, I'm just going to talk in like the first person.