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What are the career paths for a software engineer at Google?

• I'm a software engineer with a bachelors degree and six years of experience. I've only worked for two small startups so far and I'm looking for the big company experience. I would like to know more about the possible career paths at Google. Is one likely to advance to more senior engineering roles and entry-level management roles or is this very difficult due to competition from too many individuals with the same ambitions? Does Google promote internally or hire from outside the company for management roles? Is it possible to switch into a product management role from an engineering role or is this uncommon?

• Answer:

  First off, why are you asking the question?  Are you asking because you want to know if there are opportunities for advancement, in the scope/breadth of what you are working on?   Are you asking because you want more money?  Are you asking because you want more status? Google has a engineering career track that goes from Software Engineer I all the way up to Google Fellow.  It is certainly possible to go all the way up to Google Fellow without being a manager, with all of the attendant increases in compensation (both cash and equity) that you would expect while moving up the ranks.  That being said, it's rare that someone will go much beyond, say Principal Engineer without managing at least a small group of people.    Something which is very common at Google is a "TLM", or Tech Lead/Manager.  That means someone who is the technical lead of a small group of engineers, who also serves as their manager.   You can become a TLM at many different ladders of the technical track, so it is a role description more than a title or track categorization. Google's cultural beliefs is that it is much easier to take an engineer and train them to be a great manager, than it is to take a manager from the industry, and expect them to familiarize themselves with the Google technologies, and the Google Culture.  So I'm hard pressed to think of anyone who was hired into Google as a line manager, or a 2nd-level manager.   And I'd say that all of the managers I've met so far at Google have been very good managers, so it seems to be a model that works well. That being said, there is also a management track, for those people who end up becoming directors and eventually, vice presidents.  So there are managers who eventually end up specializing to performing only management functions.  But my experience is even for folks on the management ladder, Google directors and VP's tend to be much more technical than their counterparts at other companies that I've worked, such as IBM. The reason why I ask the question that I did at the beginning of this answer is that if you are an engineer with only six years of experience, and you are already asking about the management track, think very hard about how passionate you are about engineering --- or are you bucking for a job that involves budgets and performance reviews and collating and presenting Powerpoint slide decks to upper management?   If it is the latter, IBM has a career track which is perfect for people with that kind of interest, and perhaps that's a better company for you. But at Google, the best way to be hired into Engineering, is to be passionate about engineering.   The managers I've seen at Google tend to practice the servant leadership (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership) model of management.   Which is to say, it's more about doing the grunt work that is needed to enable engineers to get their job done, than it is about any kind of status or perk.   That's why so many managers tend to be TLM's.  To them, the technical work is the fun stuff, and the management stuff is the stuff they are willing to do so that the project which they are so passionate about can succeed.