Road to L6 SDE

In a beautiful October morning, I walked with a team member towards the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. Amazon’s HQ2 office is conveniently located across the road of the Mt. Vennon trailhead. We had no excuse not to walk the 3.6 miles and enjoy the amazing color of fall. The team member was part of a wave of L4 SDEs I hired 3 years ago. They all successfully moved up to the L5 SDE rank in 2 years. But several of them left KMS to explore the world in other big name companies. He was the few left. “Do you want to become a L6 SDE in KMS before you leave? ”, I asked. “Sure. But what is like to be a L6 SDE?” “Well, this is a long topic, but since we have a long walk to go ...” There are three stages of L6 SDE. 1. Technical stage: for a L6 SDE in KMS it includes programming language, Amazon specific tools, security engineering, cryptography, distributed computing etc. To be a L6 SDE you need to get a reasonable fluency of all of them but achieve mastery of 1 or 2 areas - become the go-to people, the subject matter expert, the component or problem space owner. This is the early stage of a L6 SDE. 2. Methodology stage: methodology is a way of system thinking and problem solving. Most technologies are only meaningful in certain time and space. For examples, knowledge about Amazon's internal tools stops making sense once you leave Amazon. Your Java programming skills are outdated once the software industry stops using Java. But methodologies like divide and conquer, map-reduce etc. will always be valuable wherever you go. A L6 SDE starts to see a problem as part of a interconnected system: they see structures, patterns, events and processes underneath isolated problems. Their solution tends to solve one type of problems, instead of just one problem. This is the middle stage of a L6 SDE. 3. The “Tao” stage: at this stage you start see the “pattern” behind all patterns. You start to ask first principle questions. You stop seeing the world as black and white, instead you can hold two conflicting opinions concurrently and find harmony between them. A seasoned L6 SDE at their mature stage starts to get a peek of the “Tao”. Some of them will continue the journey to pursue the “Tao”, to find the ultimate meaning in life. “We will all leave KMS one day. To know one will leave the team in 2 years, give a healthy perspective of what is important NOW: what can you leave behind?” “A L6 SDE will leave behind something worthy to the organization. It might be a framework to handle a type of complicated large workload problems. It might be performance engineering innovation that dropped latency by 10x ... something their future team members will remember their name for” “Look, that is Lincoln Memorial. We’ve arrived. Lincoln left behind something worthy to the world, to the ages, can we?”