Every time I hear someone from big tech talk about being a "L"-something (or in this blog they're "E" levels), I wonder if they know they sound exactly like the bureaucracy talk of the US Federal Government employees and their "GS" "E" or "O" levels.
For better or worse, when you get to a certain size you absolutely NEED that level of bureaucracy. You can't get 120,000 full time employees plus probably another 100,000 contractors to work together without establishing a clear hierarchy that everyone inside it understands. A smaller company can have different approaches because they will have a dense network of employee relationships, and can work together off of those relationships. However, at six figure employee scale by necessity you will end up with a very very sparse matrix of employee relationships, so you have to have something else to get results.
A lot of really big companies have super flat hierarchies when I worked at one we had MPG2, MPG4 then Senior Management U,T,S
Promotion was brutal you might have 20 MPG4 slots every 18 Months for the entire Division (60k FTE) - just getting to the Board Stage was tough enough.
I think a MPG2 was equivalent to a Captain an S was a Grade 7 (GS15 in US terms I think) Full Colonel
You just proved the GP's point. Whether the hierarchy is flat or not is irrelevant, they still have the bureaucracy around leveling and authority/responsibility.
Every time I hear someone from big tech talk about being a "L"-something (or in this blog they're "E" levels), I wonder if they know they sound exactly like the bureaucracy talk of the US Federal Government employees and their "GS" "E" or "O" levels.