I'm a Google Engineer and I Have a Question I Can't Shake
There's a question I keep coming back to on bad days. It's not a complicated question. It doesn't require a system design whiteboard or a binary search to answer. It's just this:
What's the difference between me and a developer at TCS?
I don't mean it as a slight to either of us. I mean it as a genuine, uncomfortable question about the system we're both inside of. I'm good at my job — I know that. But being good at my job doesn't automatically explain why I'm here and someone equally capable isn't.
The Leetcode Lottery
Let's start with the thing nobody in big tech wants to say out loud: the hiring bar is mostly pattern recognition.
I got into Google because I spent months grinding Leetcode. I internalized the patterns. Sliding window, two pointers, monotonic stack, topological sort — I could identify which template a problem needed within a minute of reading it. That's a skill, sure. But is it the skill? Is it even a relevant skill?
There are developers at TCS who are excellent debuggers, who write clean production code, who deeply understand the businesses they build for. Some of them could absolutely do my job. But they didn't spend three months on Leetcode premium, so they're writing CRUD apps for a fraction of my salary.
I'm not saying the interview process is pure noise. There's signal in the ability to think under pressure, break down problems, write working code on a whiteboard. But let's not pretend it's a clean meritocracy. It's a filter — and filters have false negatives.
The Price Tag Question
Here's the math that keeps me up at night.
My total comp is probably 3-4x what a mid-level developer at an Indian services company makes. Am I 3-4x more productive? Am I producing 3-4x more value?
I do hard things. I work on systems that serve millions of users. I make technical decisions that have real consequences. But I'd be lying if I said every day looks like that. Some days I'm in meetings about meetings. I'm writing a design doc that three people will read. I'm navigating internal tooling that exists only because Google built it instead of using something off the shelf.
And on those days, somewhere, a TCS developer shipped a feature to production. A real feature. For a real customer.
The uncomfortable truth is that compensation in tech isn't purely a function of skill or output. It's a function of leverage — the revenue per engineer at your company, the replaceability calculus, the geographical arbitrage. I'm expensive because Google can afford me, and because enough people competed for this seat to drive the price up. That's economics, not merit.
I know the counterargument. "You're working on systems at a scale most developers never touch." And that's true. But scale isn't the same as difficulty. Sometimes scale just means the system is so mature that your job is to not break it. That's important work. But it's not the kind of work that justifies a superiority complex.
What "Senior" Actually Means
When I got promoted to senior, I expected to feel different. More confident. More settled. Like I'd crossed some threshold and now belonged.
I didn't.
What I've learned is that "senior" at a big company is partly a skill marker and partly a game-played-well marker. It means you delivered real technical work, yes. But it also means you found the right project with the right visibility, wrote the right doc, got the right people to vouch for you. You understood the system — and that's a real skill. But it's a very different skill from pure technical excellence.
The industry treats L5 at Google like a universal credential. But I've met brilliant L4 engineers and startup devs who've built and shipped more in two years than some senior engineers have in four. The level is a proxy, and like all proxies, it's lossy.
The Luck Factor
If I'm being really honest, here's what separates me from the developer who didn't end up at Google:
I went to a college where seniors talked about FAANG prep. I had a friend group that normalized spending weekends on competitive programming. I had a laptop and stable internet and a room where I could study. I had parents who could afford to let me focus on placement prep instead of working part-time.
Then I happened to interview on a day when I got problems I'd seen variations of. The interviewer was in a good mood. My system design answer happened to align with what they were looking for.
None of that is pure luck. I worked hard. I am good at what I do. But the opportunity to work hard at the right things, at the right time, in the right direction — that part involved a lot of things I didn't control.
And I think a lot of us in big tech quietly know this, but we don't say it because it complicates the narrative. Not that we didn't earn this — we did. But that earning it wasn't the only ingredient. And someone who didn't end up here isn't proof that they didn't work hard enough.
So What Do I Do With This?
I don't have a clean answer. That's the point.
Some days I channel it into the work itself — shipping something meaningful, mentoring someone, writing code I'm proud of instead of code that checks a promo box. Proving it to myself, not to the system.
Other days I channel it into building something outside of Google entirely. Something where the value I create is directly visible, where the feedback loop is customers paying, not peers calibrating.
And some days I just sit with the tension. Not the tension of "am I good enough" — I know I'm good. But the tension of knowing that the system that rewarded me didn't reward someone equally good. That my comp isn't a measure of my worth relative to theirs. That the gap between us is narrower than our paychecks suggest.
I don't think imposter syndrome is always irrational. Sometimes it's your brain correctly noticing that the system doesn't perfectly correlate skill with status, or effort with reward. That's not a comfortable realization. But it might be an honest one.
And maybe the most useful thing you can do with that honesty is stop confusing your price tag with your identity — in either direction.
If you've ever quietly Googled "am I good enough for Google" at 2 AM — you're not alone. But the question you should probably be asking is whether Google is the right way to measure "good enough."