I worked at a company where the founder manufactured an inane 13 level hierarchy (at seed!!!). We had two engineers, all level one, lol.

So there were 14 employees total, if I had to guess? /s

Even startups benefit from job titles and hierarchy.

Even startup employees benefit from a visible promotion path. Remember, they had hundreds of employees. Not just a couple people in a small office somewhere.

Most likely, the levels corresponded to pay bands and helped determine where people fit into the seniority hierarchy (such as determining who receives sensitive daily information updates)

You are 100% right — for late stage startups where you would normally see 500 people.

At the Fast stage, the only viable promotion path is ship work that impacts the business or close deals that bring in revenue. The promotion levels game is something you play in larger organizations to engineer a rat race for people because it turns out they really like that. But no, a startup does not benefit from hierarchy quite the opposite in fact. That crap is all overhead it’s necessary as you grow but actually detrimental to your success.

they were a company of nearly 500 people. they had 150 engineers. At that stage people who don't have levels will feel like they have no direction.

This is just such a big company mentality.

Yes, you need like Engineer and Senior Engineer and then when you have some rock stars who actually move the business forward they are your principles and/or future directors.

To try to build this all up ahead of time, show me where it's ever worked? When Google was that size they were playing with having no managers at all.

If you're only interested in sniping FAANG talent, arbitrary levels provide a familiar comfort, and an opportunity to offer a level up immediately upon joining. "You're level L4 at Google, but we'll bring you in at L14".

>> * Fast hired engineers, engineering managers, product managers, and executives directly from Big Tech. Many of the software engineers joined from Meta, Google, Uber, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and other well-known companies. Many joining had competing offers both from Big Tech and other high-growth startups.

Oh shit, there is no number in front of my name! What will I do with my life? The incredible vanity of it all.

Yeah that’s all fine and good but 6 levels is ridiculous for a new startup. My company has been around for 30 years, doing $75 million in sales this year, has 300 employees and we now have 4 levels, one more than last year, and even that feels artificial.

Levels before you even have product market fit is a joke.

I completely disagree. They were 450 people with 150 engineers. If I had to guess I would bet the engineers clamored for leveling and it came from bottoms up requests and a need to be fair with compensation when hiring.

Now to be clear they shouldn't have been that big (clearly), but leveling people was not the problem.

That simply begs the question of why in god's name a startup with no traction needs 150 engineers.

Engineering is expanding, to meet the needs of the expanding engineering. Continuously built self-scaling heuristic AI-based microservices that have full resiliency across four datacenters and twelve chaos monkeys.

Do not underestimate mans ability to overcomplicate things, when his continuing employment depends on him finding more things to engineer.

I believe startups should implement levels once you hire 2 engineers. It's hard to retrofit a system, especially if you're trying to be thoughtful about any pay imbalances.

> startups should implement levels once you hire 2 engineers

I think OP is cracking a joke about a $600k company having six levels of hierarchy.

Here's my experience:

- When you hire, you implicitly put people in a level which dictates what you're willing to pay them.

- People will always feel underpaid, and demand more $$. Without a system, you give them out arbitrarily.

- You now have enough people to add structure to the process. Do you base people's levels on their current salary? On their skill?

- What happens when people notice the discrepancy in pay or skill among a level? Especially if it's skewed by race, gender, etc?

I think you should have as many levels as pay-bands in your startup, which might be 6.

Nobody wants to be a level 1. So the real level 1 was probably L4.

L1 is junior data center tech and junior helpdesk.

There weren't necessarily 6 levels of hierarchy (below the L6 staff). It's almost certainly for hiring purposes - to tell hires that their role is similar to that of a Staff Software Engineer at Google (i.e., L6). Like many things in tech, other companies tend to base their leveling system after Google, and you can literally put companies side by side on https://levels.fyi to compare per-level compensation at different companies.

It's a recruiting tactic - to tell the FAANG engineer that they'll be as important as a Staff Software Engineer (L6) at Google.

That's what happens when you go on a crazy hiring spree.