that's interesting because that's how the consulting world works too. Start at a big firm, work for a few years, then jump to a small firm two levels above where you were. The after two years, come back to the big firm and get hired one level up from where you left. Rinse/repeat. It's the fastest promotion path in consulting.
It’s not necessarily “larger”, so much as different units. In a big company, the hiring budget is measured in headcount, but the promotion budget is measured in dollar percentage. It’s much easier to add $20k salary to get a hire done than to give that same person a $20k bump the following year.
The original poster who you are replying to was answering an orthogonal but related question and they both are true.
1. It is easier to make more money by being hired than by being promoted or not even being promoted and just kept at market rates for doing your current job. I addressed that in a sibling reply.
2. It’s easier to come in at a higher level than to be promoted to a higher level. To get “promoted” at BigTech there is a committee, promo docs where you have to document how you have already been working at that level and your past reviews are taken into account.
To come in that level you control the narrative and only have to pass 5-6 rounds of technical and behavioral interviews.
If I came into my current company at a level below staff, it would have taken a couple of years to be promoted to my current staff position (equivalent to a senior at AWS) and a few successful projects. All I had to do was interview well and tell the stories I wanted to tell about my achievements over the past 4 years. I didn’t have to speak on failures.
It’s a lot cheaper to replace an employee by one who leaves at market rate than to pay all of your developers at market rate. Many are going to stick around because of inertia, their lack of ability to interview well, golden handcuffs of RSUs, they don’t feel like rebuilding the social capital at another company or the naive belief in the “mission”, “passion” etc
Mgmt/hr playing a game of chicken and you don't know you're playing.
I went from an L5 (mid) working at AWS ProServe as a consultant (full time role) to a year later (and a shitty company in between) as a “staff architect” - like you said two levels up - at a smaller cloud consulting company.
If I had any interest in ever working for BigTech again (and I would rather get an anal probe daily with a cactus), I could relatively easily get into Google’s equivalent department as a “senior” based on my connections.