Hiding your level is silly
While I was at Google, everyone’s level was public by default. One could opt out of showing their level but the vast majority of engineers had their level public. I recently learned that now levels are hidden by default – it’s unclear why though it looks like it was tied with a migration of the tool displaying levels.
My personal take is that levels should be public:
- It’s useful to calibrate expectations – e.g. you wouldn’t throw a new grad on a company wide outage by themselves, you would make sure they have enough support for them to be successful. You basically end up working in a more efficient manner.
- It’s better for people’s growth as performance expectations are better calibrated – e.g. one bad situation that can happen if you try to go for promo but one of your peers thought you were one level lower – and they never had a chance to provide feedback on what you were lacking.
Eventually people will figure out your level, hiding it just makes the initial interactions more difficult.
On the other hand, it’s important to acknowledge that someone’s level is a very broad performance signal – you can be underperforming at a given level or be close to the next one. So we shouldn’t anchor too much on someone’s level but just use it as a broad signal.