Wait, Weren’t They Already That Level?

How Google promotions actually worked — the packet, the committee, and the day your peers say it should have happened sooner.

In Big Tech, around evaluation season, the word promotion comes at you from every angle. These are notes on the subject — a sensitive one in many ways, alongside leveling. The frame is Google headquarters in the 2010s, so the bias runs strong.

At companies that operate a level system, you can call it level up — same thing. In Korean it translates to seungjin or jingeup. A small aside: in US K-12 schools, moving up a grade is called promotion; the act of finishing high school with the diploma is graduation. Your first real graduation is high school.

Crossing a Wage Band

Simply put, promotion is the act of crossing into the next wage band — and there aren’t actually that many bands. For an ordinary engineer, it’s one cross into the junior bucket, one into senior, and very rarely one into staff. Beyond that lies the exceptional, which I’ll leave outside this piece — it’s a road I haven’t walked.

Looking at the generation before mine, this was a life event that happened only a handful of times. Even at a Korean company with a tenured ladder — staff, assistant manager, manager, deputy general manager, general manager — that’s at most four moves across twenty years, roughly once every five. If hobong (Korea’s seniority-based pay step) is the slow climb of compensation, promotion is the leap up a stair — heavier in meaning than the school grade-advance kind.

It should happen naturally when performance, visibility, and recognition stack up — but in a US Big Tech where many people have to be persuaded, it usually doesn’t go automatic. It comes with a rough process.

Maybe that’s why promotion sits in a strange place among job-hoppers. Can the next company decide your level from interviews alone? Not easily. Other companies half-trust your previous interview record and career — and a promotion at a previous company carries weight beyond just having interviewed well. Without that, the new company has to trust your word, and awkward situations follow.

When people swap promotion war stories later, everyone remembers their own as the hardest. L6 (Staff Engineer) is especially brutal because so much of it is persuading others on impact. There was a running joke that quitting, founding a startup, and getting acquired was the faster path. The real process needs methods for persuading multiple people, and the materials to back it up.

The Process

Preparation usually starts six months out. In a typical case, after three or four cycles of exceeds expectations or better, people start nudging in different directions — let’s pay attention to this one next time. When all that material is collected, it becomes what’s called a packet — self-assessment, peer reviews, manager support (assessment), evidence in the form of launches or design docs. There’s a lot for the manager to do, especially when the report doesn’t have a single obvious thing others see at a glance — you have to build that in advance.

The most impressive thing about the promotion cycle was that it was designed so no single manager’s call decides. It starts with peer review — and the notable detail is that the direct manager’s review isn’t trusted by default. A manager may not know their own team that well, may write generously out of affection, or harshly from conflict. So peers’ views are collected separately and merged in.

Among peer reviews, one or two lines from a higher-level person on a different team weigh differently than the rest. “I watched them do this kind of thing well, in this kind of place” — from another team’s senior — lands at a different angle than a same-team teammate’s praise. It’s evidence of being someone visible in cross-functional spaces. The opposite is rough: being marked unfavorably by a senior on another team is a bad position to be in.

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The promotion committee usually meets in private. If you imagine a meeting that evaluates conservatively, where the most diligent work is finding reasons it can’t happen, you’ve got most of it. As a manager, you could ask to observe — sit in and listen as other orgs ran theirs, how managers defended their cases, how they got pushed back on. The official meaning was watch and learn. In practice, sitting in that room for an hour or two was a bigger education than any guide read across the entire evaluation season.

Finding the Right Fit

If you asked me to name the most stressful thing a manager does, it would be running the promotion cycle. It’s the biggest milestone in growing a report; it’s the last step that converts good performance into a result. So it weighs on you.

For managers from Korea, where talking yourself up is awkward, it isn’t easy. Don’t handle it and they don’t move up; handle it and they still might not — it needs the right preparation, which is exactly what makes it stressful. Especially the impact piece — that has to be there to keep the conversation going. Without it, all you’re left muttering to yourself is “but they’re really good at the work…”

The ironic shape of a good promotion is that it arrives late. The person has already been working at that level for a year or two; one cycle, it goes through quietly. When colleagues react with “Wait, weren’t they already that level?” — that’s the good signal. The work followed the person. The time before that usually has a lot of stories in it.

After tenure, you reach a point where running another cycle doesn’t matter that much. It stops being about motivation; the reward becomes the work itself — doing what you want to do, well, from where you sit. You stop chasing promotion, and the work that suits you comes anyway. That privilege tends to get extended to people who’ve made it to senior. Of course, in the current era — where layoffs are routine — there’s a new set of orders on top of all this.

When promotion results land — early May, early November — the market sees a wave of people enter. Both the promoted and the not-promoted try to move, for their own reasons. From a manager’s chair, it’s bittersweet, but you get used to growing people well and sending them onto other teams.

And in Korea, in the AI Era

In Korean companies, smaller ones often don’t have many promotion steps — or don’t have any. Titles are sometimes assigned arbitrarily. Senior or staff mean different things at different companies, and there’s often no actual venue where people agree on who fits what seat. A level that gets set, once, is shaped by factors other than effort.

The argument against bothering with promotion has a reasonable basis. At small companies, head of and chief fill the air. On the other end, there are companies that pay well, slot people as MTS or staff engineer, and ride that flat label until they scale — a necessary step in growing an organization.

In the US, stock vesting is typically a four-year schedule, so four years at one company with one promotion is, more often than not, an advanced practitioner. “What did you do to get promoted?” and “Tell me about a project you’re most proud of” are roughly the same interview question. Those cycles are different in Korea, so candidates often draw a blank on those questions. The thread connects back to evaluation; it might also be why “Employee of the Month — five times” stands out on Korean resumes instead.

Do AI agents have levels? Whether sub-agents end up classified in tiers like people, or on a completely different axis, is something I don’t know yet. But the question — who at what level carries what responsibility? — won’t disappear even if its form changes.

Part of Lessons from the Company — first-person notes from inside engineering organizations, from my years at Google and after. See the full series →

Adapted from my Korean essay on Brunch: brunch.co.kr/@chaesang/176