When an offer arrives, almost everybody looks at one number. The salary. Far fewer people ask the question underneath it, which is what level they are being hired at, and that question tends to matter more.
Most companies of any size sort engineers into levels, whatever they call them. The level decides your pay band, which decides how far your salary can rise before you hit a ceiling nobody mentioned. It decides what work you are trusted with in the first year and how people read you in meetings. And it sets the starting point for every promotion that follows.
Here is the uncomfortable part. Moving up a level from inside is usually slow. There is a case to build, a committee, a cycle to wait for, a budget. Being hired a level higher happens in one conversation. People who accept an offer a level below where they already perform often spend two years earning back what they could have asked for in a week.
So ask. Before you discuss money, find out what level the offer is at and what the next one up expects. Ask how they decided. If the answer is that it was close, you have an opening. Offer evidence rather than feelings: the system you owned, the team you led through a migration, the decisions you made that somebody above you would otherwise have made.
Sometimes they will not move. Then ask a different question. What would I need to show in my first year to be at the next level, and can we agree to look at it at the first review? Get the answer in writing. Written criteria turn a vague hope into something you can check.
Be honest in the other direction too. Being hired above what you can do is its own trap, because you start in a hole with everybody watching. You want the level that matches the work you already do on a normal week, not on your best one.
The salary is what you notice on the first payslip. The level is what you notice three years later.
– Asael Shinder
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