To the extent that I've ever heard people talk about "Real Googlers" the criteria have nothing to do with title, level, background or what college you went to.
The criteria are:
1) Get st done
2) Don't be a dick
> I would guess he was hired at Senior SWE (which is respectable; unlike the title-inflated startups out there, it actually is fairly senior) or Staff SWE. The Real Googler Line is somewhere within those two tiers. It's not just about title, but location and project play a role. Most Staff are Real Googlers, some Senior are, SWE 2-3 are not unless they're hired as proteges (which is rare).
I didn't know the term either but he answered it in a post below.
You've never heard of it because MChurch is the only one that uses it. It is something he made up to explain the fact that he came to Google and people didn't recognize his "genius", despite his many high-profile attempts to explain to everyone what we were doing wrong.
It's not an official designation, obviously. It's where your bozo bit starts. If you're a Real Googler, people approach you with BozoBit := false.
Here's the Google engineering ladder:
SWE 2 (fresh college graduate)
SWE 3 (fresh PhD or 5+ years experience)
Senior SWE (manager-equivalent; first acceptable "terminal" level.)
Staff SWE (serious engineering chops)
Sr. Staff SWE (rare; candidate for Director/Principal)
Principal SWE (Director-equivalent)
Distinguished SWE
Eng. Fellow (VP equivalent)
I'd say that 5% of SWE 2-3 are Real Googlers, 35% of Senior are, and 85% of Staff are.
Real Googler means you have freedom of the castle. If you want to work on Search, you work on Search. If you want to dedicate the next 6 months to the maintenance of a module on which your work depends, you do it. It's like an open-allocation environment, and similar to what Google was before it got Too Big.
Below the Real Googler Line, you actually sweat performance reviews because your manager can unilaterally reduce your credibility to zero. Above it, projects and managers compete for you. There's probably some room for play (when you're slightly above RGL, you might still worry) but it has a binary feel to it. When you're a Real Googler, you have independent credibility. You don't sweat Perf.
Traditionally, the RGL was the Senior SWE tier. That was the level at which you were trusted to choose projects, and even manage if it were needed.
You're expected to make Sr. SWE in 3 years from SWE 3 and 5 years from SWE 2. If you don't, it's like being denied tenure and your project options (which probably weren't great, since 99% of getting promoted is getting on the right projects) continue to decline.
If you have Real Googler credibility, you can get away with a lot. There are people who start strong and get promoted, then go along for 3+ years without committing any code before they get fired. That's what RG gets you: a 3-year audit cycle. On the other hand, if you're not above the RGL, while it's not technically speaking hard to stay employed, it's extremely competitive to get into a position where you can have a real impact.
Slotting was abolished. Originally, software engineers were hired at mid-levels and "slotted" about a year in. Downslotting was more common (60-70%, IIRC) than upslotting. Some people even got double-down, which essentially ends your career.
Downslotting doesn't end your career (again, most people go down) but it does send a signal that you're considered to be part of "the rest" rather than "the best" and the scent of mediocrity will follow you.
It's a dishonest HR trick that enables Google to recruit people with the "Senior Engineer" title but then tell them, once they get in, that they're actually "SWE 3.5" who will be evaluated for SWE 3 vs. Senior at some later time.
So, in effect, you have to get a promotion in order to get the job title you were promised. That said, it's fairly harmless if you know about it, because HR will confirm your pre-downslotting title (and titles matter most of all externally in any environment). It's only evil if you go in with half-knowledge and think you're going to be 2/3 of a level higher than you actually are.
Slotting no longer applies, unless they've re-instituted it. It was abolished around March 2011. It was terrible for morale and HR eventually realized it was shitty idea.
When I was at IBM, I was hired in as a STSM (band 10; the next level up was DE). One of the huge handicaps I had for being parachuted into a very large company at a relatively high level was that I had to work extra hard to establish my "network" with other STSM's and DE's. There was a certain amount of automatic "if you are a STSM, then automatically your BozoBit is false"), but since there were stories of STSM's who had retired in place, it certainly wasn't an automatic grant of credibility.
So your concept of "Real Googler" is (a) not as binary as you make it out to be, and (b) it is a reality in any large company, and indeed, in our entire industry. (You think someone like Guido van Rossum worries about promotions, or doesn't get the pick of which jobs he wants? :-)
If you don't have a good network, where your competence and your work is known outside of your local team, then yes, you are largely dependent on your manager in terms advocating for you for your promotions, and it will be harder to convince another manager in another team to advocate for an exception to the general rules of thumb of transferring early after being hired (yes, it does happen, and yes, it is an exception, and yes there are some really good reasons for that guideline to be in place). I can't speak to whether or not you had a good manager or not[1], but for someone who is more junior, of course your experience at a company is going to be more dependent on whether you had a good manager or not --- that's true everywhere! I can say that all of the managers I've had at Google have been excellent, and they all have had a very similar attitude that which was expressed by Matt Welsh --- the attitude of "servant leadership", where your goal is to remove obstacles that are getting in the way of those who work for you, and for whom you are very glad to shower credit upon them, because a high functioning team reflects well on the manager and on the tech lead.
[1] I can't speak to this because I'm not familiar with your local team or who your manager was; I only saw your behavior on a company-wide engineering mailing list.
Bottom line? If you want to get ahead, you need to establish your competence and your value to other technical people in your company, and in your industry. You don't do this by putting down people who are well known in the company and in the industry, and you don't do this by asserting that you have executive level vision and bemoaning the fact that no one is willing to listen to you and willing to grasp how brilliant you are. No, you put your head down, and you do good work, and you help other people.
I may be the ext4 maintainer, and I may be well known, but far more often than not I'm reviewing other people's code, fixing up other people's code, fixing bugs, and helping users. There's a huge amount of grunt work involved, and I'm happy to do it and I'm happy to shower credit on people at other companies who have invested time and energy making ext4 better. That's how you get ahead in the world, not by asserting how great you are and by putting down other engineers and/or other companies. Other people will be able to very quickly draw their own conclusions.
