* Stability at Microsoft is a two-edged sword. My manager told me a while ago that I was about to get one. I sat there at L64 for 5+ years. And a knife-fight for L65 (some other day). Given all that, the two things that are key to promotion are:1) Your relationship with your skip level manager. As per Microsoft's job posting, the specific position requires over 8 years of experience so it pays high as well. But, if you have the possibility of finding a position that you will really enjoy, where your goals and those of Microsoft are fairly close, then your long-term potential will be higher. Director can be applied to L65 or L66. When it comes to where you actually rank and what you get paid that part is all that matters. : those titles are organization specific. The CSPs are a good attempt to define each level, but anyone who is looking at the CSPs and saying I do that, and that, , but Im not getting promoted is almost certainly missing the point. I've also worked for great managers, and worked with great people on my team. I want to share some of my thoughts about succeeding at Microsoft and reaching Level 63, the Senior contributor level at Microsoft. I've been 3.5 years at 62 and re-orged every year in mobile.Any ideas on how to carry greats results of one role into another through a re-org. But it's no guarantee that all your peers will match. This is obviously difficult to manage. High energy, result oriented senior executive with 20yrs+ of comprehensive Sales, Marketing & Operations management experience in IT (Solutions & Services) in GCC region, with a record of. Don't waste it. You want to test more cases than he does, you want to build something that draws users to what you're doing more than to his.You're never competing with your manager. It's really not that complicated. Additionally, a Level 62 doesn't really have the tools to evaluate and sell a promotion to a 63. I am not worried. You have to be extremely faithful to your management while at the same time carefuly growing your broad influence to your manager's piers. Owning big features, knowledge about code base, ability to help your peers - irrelevant. SQL is one of the groups that has consistently delivered quality and growth. Many folks lurk longer in the 60-62 range because they are not challenged enough to move to the next level. Facebook, Go to company page So here's my 2 cents:Read this now and have a game plan for your 1:1s to tee up a deeper discussion at MYCD. Once you identify those things scream about it by sending email with problem and solution and offer leadership to eliminate that imperfection. I am working towards it would say am there 75% of the way. Its UI is fundamentally incoherent, showing probably the worst case of design-by-committee since the control room at Three Mile Island. The average entry-level engineer or program manager will have a total compensation of $125,665. Taking on the toughest hardest problems does line up well with something everyone has talked about on this post - that is - make your managers look good. I think that everyone has a bad year or 2 and you should not get worried about spending a lot of years in one level unless you have been on the same team for a long time.So my advice is1. "There is no greater de-motivator than a reward system that is perceived to be unfair. I'd like to see a transition plan from you in 2 days". Therefore, our need for people who can collaborate across their own team, across disciplines, across org boundaries is greater than ever before. A mentor helps tremendously. These guys are typically outcome of recent hiring sprees. senior director - $446k . For example, when I joined MS in 1990 there were 6 devs working on the first version of Word for Windows. Microsoft Director level role - Level 66 - what should I expect from COMP sideYOE-15Current TC- 235k, Go to company page If you are within striking distance of level 63 in the next few years, then consider yourself VERY fortunate. Sometimes the answer is, "well, we'll see" and other times the answer is, "if they'd only stop doing X and start doing Y on a sustained basis, I could see it". I think that a compentent dev not a superstar, who follows your advice should make it to 63. I was let go from Microsoft recently. Some considerations, based on my own career:- The best way to get to level 63 is moving around, and getting promotions as you move. I've seen L65's who can't own a cardboard box, let alone a room. The higher you go, the longer it takes. Senior-level employees have the most decision-making power at a company and are meant to provide leadership and guidance to employees with less seniority. Join the Levels.fyi community to chat with employees at Microsoft and other tech companies. A Senior Director gets a basic salary package of $190,000, which gets as high . Are you sure you know what your boss wants? PROFESSIONAL SKILLS & HIGHLIGHTS OF QUALIFICATIONS Over 20+ years of experience working in large-scale real-time corporate environments Able to communicate concepts and details to clients, development team and testing team Excellent organization and communication skills, both written and verbal: clear and concise Knowledge of computer development software across multiple platforms . Specifically, that is a tendency to try and do everything themselves, taking too much individual accountability as opposed to building a v-team across orgs etc etc.Most managers in Microsoft - in my personal experieince - are competent managers. Obviously a key word in my advice was explicitly. I got to point where I resented my manager so much I could barely talk to him. I've lucked out a bit by working on a key project for our group and division, although a lot of that was due to my own contributions. I'd like to hear some more experiences from MCS. If you're off-path, you can turn it around. It's a lot better than folks being ambivalent about your success or failure, right? For example, some are principal individual contributors that just stayed for too long in a group and became essential, but now want to move on and cannot do that, either because their skills are obsolete or because they simply cannot go to a new startup team at such high level without any management responsibility, and they are untested managers. From my perspective (L67) here's what you need to nail:1. What does that look like in your mind? What got you here ain't gonna get you there. I have seen and known many of my own peers who don't get promoted because of potential but the number of people you know in the leadership team. Happy hunting. About Top-performing Senior Director in Digital Strategy & Commercial Development, with 25 years success in top-tier business across new Tech, data and digital in many sectors driving strategy,. I'm interested in hearing your stories of success, mentorship, and turning a career that was off-path back on-track. Harder for L64. Feedback is not detailed or actionable. Secondly, finding a suitable mentor to help them overcome that weakness. I would lay some level of accountability with management as well, though. That didnt happen by chance alone. Over the years, we have acted as a preferred talent acquisition partner to. The first was the barter (a position exists that I qualify for - give it to me now and I will commit to staying with the team another year. During that time I had two good to great managers. Senior->principal->partner are the level bands, 63/64->65/66/67, 68/69/70. Levels are all about perception.I know devs who are underlevelled and devs who are over-levelled. Great post! Really inspiring. I've been at Microsoft six years.I've never spent one second honestly thinking about my career or how to get a promotion or anything like that. Otherwise, you start getting limited reviews and your compensation goes down.Obviously there was no advice in this post, but I thought it was an interesting observation, and perhaps the company can learn something from this viewpoint. RIF in the SQL team? Contributed and exceeded in two roles - getting G-Star, then moved to another team with clear headroom and again, exceeded all commits and moved to L64. I agree with some comments that level make no difference. YES, life is unfair.At the end, mastering 'soft skills' will help anyone: even someone at 59. I work in MSN and we still have no way to know the levels of our peers. Your response is private Was this worth your time? I have known some that do what is barely enough for "achieve" just because it is safe. Join the Levels.fyi community to chat with employees at Microsoft and other tech companies. Let's compare answers answer is: your boss. Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer. If you can't ever figure it out, and if you can't become a "favorite underling", then it's time to find a different group with people you can better relate-to. I've been a 62 for too long by Microsoft standards. Promotion budgets of 65 and above has been kept intact.Can somebody from HR confirm this?If true then this post is quite untimely. Microsoft Software Engineering Manager salary levels ranges from 63 (SDE Lead) upto 80 (Corporate VP), with 80 (Corporate VP) level earning average salary of $4851k along with $3675k worth of stock options. That means, know what people think about you and what they don't. He is a very, very smart guy.For many people, what made them successful as a level 62 IC will kill them as a level 62 manager. Mini-Microsoft, Mini-Microsoft, lean-and-mean! Think Locally: remember three years back when we talked about the book Corporate Confidential? Could be principal engineer, principal engineering manager, could even be director depending on the org. great post. Lots of very true points. I'm a Level 64 in Office and I agree that the Level Compression puts a crimp in promotion velocity in Office. Some are good at all. "This is the lament of every person in every big company everywhere it's usually a combination of truth (most of us are capable of more than the roles we're currently filling) and hubris (if I had a nickel for ever junior person who over-estimated what they were capable of I'd be retired). check the ego out, ensure that people around you (the whole team is successful), create the best results possible and your promotion wont be far away. Tech savvy yet entrepreneurship minded hence able to see things from . Leverage your professional network, and get hired. For some teams - especially those like Office with few departures release-to-release resulting in level compression - that's a rough bunch. There's a need to ooze authority in a way that is comforting to the person above you responsible for your career. If youve been at Level 62 longer than about 3 years MS may not be the best fit for you and you should probably be considering other options.kc. Isn't morale over the holidays going to be just wonderful? Know where you are in the stack and understand how you will rank higher next year.BTW, forgot to mention I was a manager for the second half of my career. They literally lived in GM's office for half a year to get the promo from L64 to L65.3. If you go looking for those problems though, you better be prepared to deliver. Up until L63, you can pretty continue to be promoted based on raw talent to get things done smartly and efficiently. Lots of groundwork, considerable drama and leverage but eventually it got done. Leadership, for instance. Anyone moved from Office to some other part of company? In general, people are not leveled, jobs are. You should NOT be looking to get more money to stay in a job you don't like. Good managers: In general, good managers realize that they need to sell their team's accomplishments. Maybe one boss likes to see a lot of code written, and another settles for less code, but fewer bugs. Wow. There were times when I was promoted more slowly than I probably could have been, but I am very happy with where I am now, and I am still growing. Heck, we would be lucky if many can do even that well. Of course everyone wants to be promoted every review, so don't bother asking right after your last promotion.What matters most is that you are doing what your manager thinks deserves to get you promoted. The current distribution is simply pathetic.. Title doesn't matter, that's a job description. I have staff that are lvl 60 and get paid as much as folks that are lvl 62. Senior directors are tenured members of an organization who are considered part of the leadership or executive team, in which they represent their department or division. i've been hearing this.. you know when you are about to cut a small feature and do balancing in your sprint/milestone essentially this is happening at VP level. The scope and situations have become more and more challenging over time. That is why to get to L65 a VP level person must know your work and be able to recall your name without help. Think about it. Flip on the klaxons! Microsoft is so unique (and not in a good way) that you need to have blogs like this and focus on managing your career inside the hobbesian nightmare, rather than making good and cool software. Director can be just principal in sales or marketing. The good thing in most teams here is that if you persist, you will get there. Look closely, and you'll probably find that this person is working symbiotically with someone else who masters those skills while lacking others.YES, there are people who've been promoted because they've simply "been there" for a long time. Find the right team and manager.2. Your own work is part of the goal. I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did in some ways. I came in at 58 (9) and having been through a) I wish I had gone through b). I just want to grow, and I am aware that it does not translate to a promotion always. work on your visibility. Chris Capossela. SoI'll repeat it again. This is the multiplier effect, or scope of influence that is often mentioned. Calibrations are like a brick wall, even in regard to comments made about you. I knew it backwards and forwards, better than anyone else does now or ever will. If it is, awesome -- go do it, drive it to completion. I work in MSN and we still have no way to know the levels of our peers. If they see flaws you have flaws. Losing focus of your target next career level will leave you with nothing but regret and wasted time, sometimes years. Microsoft Compensation Software Engineer $ 80K $ 225K Average Compensation: $101,338 Senior Cloud Software Engineer $ 90K $ 175K Average Compensation: $128,000 Principal Software Engineer $ 90K. How long do people usually sit at L62 in MCS? Get FREE domain for 1st year and build your brand new site. You're selling it in no less than eight different SKUs, (including the upgrades) and your marketing message is deliberately obfuscated to convince the customers to go for the most expensive one. "The hardest point for me to bear is that I am young, capable of doing so much more, and absolutely dying to do more. weeks to find another position within the company, otherwise they are laid off.Given 6 weeks to find a position now is a suicide (since most groups can't hire due to the freeze). Answer to second question is never ever explicitly try to make yourself known to hierarchy above your manager. Wonderful. So most new hires at MS are L63 by default and they obviously don't have to work at it :).Yes, L64->L65 transition is REALLY big deal but directly joining MS at L65 as new FTE is not a big deal and there are usually ample of open positions. Asshole managers aren't unknown at Apple [] The fact that you praise someone for "junk yard dog mode" shows me that Microsoft has a fundamentally broken corporate cultureThanks for a nice belly laugh to re-energize my morning. My experience is a constant melee of *every* single person trying to influence cross-group. Satya Nadella. I take some of the blame for not managing my career more directly, but no one should be offered a promotion when they leave--if they are valuable, let them know before hand! All of my experience is in the product development groups at MS (dev/test/pm) so my observations may not apply elsewhere. This is a large part of his job - getting his reports to excel and getting them (and by extension, himself) some recognition.All of the above assumes you don't suck, though. I joined The Company 2 weeks ago, far from 63, but all you said it's very valuable for defining a career path. Don't discount the power of a mgmt chain that believes in you. But it is also clear that there are places at Microsoft where these skills are not required until higher.I have a 62 test somehow make it to dev with mediocre dev skills, social skills limited to indifference or hostility, who managed to delegate most of the hard work to a smart kid hired to work with him and he made it to 63. They have commitments to grow their employees. Levels 57 and 58 are reserved for non-permanent employees and Levels 59 and 60 are reserved for New Graduates. This helps us sort answers on the page. This is certainly the course that I took. I heard that promotion budgets are significantly reduced at below 65 level. My boss even made mistakes. Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Most of them are not. Its nice to see constructive advice and stories from everyone.I'm in the 61 bucket and currently struggling with my team for many months. But more likely youre displaying the hallmark of a weak performer described in the article of the same name (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/01/18/MN73840.DTL). Take responsibility for defining the component in front of you -- is it really the right thing for the product/team?
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