> L6/staff

> higher-level engineers

Traditionally, one would work up to senior roles over the course of one's career, often by pursuing internal opportunities to learn and exercise new skills within one's current role before applying for new roles that rely on those now-practiced skills.

Placing into senior roles because you did well at Stanford, spent a couple years writing CRUD apps, and then grinded puzzles for a couple months is inevitably something that happens when the industry needs to fill more senior roles than there are engineers with suitable experience, but it's not a healthy phenomenon and definitely shouldn't be treated as the norm.