Level 100,200,300…, eh? WTF is that? Level xxx is a term we used at Microsoft to set expectations of the audience and the speaker. As a speaker i need to know what my audience is, and as an audience you probably do not want to attend a level 400 Neural Net if you are not prepared for it. As a rule, only the top engineers and developers delivered level 400 content. I never have, i doubt i ever will, i am not interested enough in anything to stick with it to level 400.

You can liken it to a rate yourself on a 1-10 scale of level of knowledge of a thing. 9.5 is the person that wrote the thing, so you are not a 10 at anything unless you wrote the thing. Hadley Wickham is in the 9/10 space on tidyverse. Bob Ward is one of many level 400 speakers at MSFT, though for fun sometimes they are advertised as level 500, i don’t really know what 500 means in a scale of 100-400. Mark Russinovich used to do a lot of level 400 talks on debugging windows, or process hacking for troubleshooting purposes. I think you get the point. Level 100 is targeted at everyone, most sales folks don’t know more than level 200 on a good day, so don’t be afraid to challenge them.

There was a post that went up in 2006 on the MSFT levels, still valid today, and i still like them. If you see that in my post you will know to keep reading or save for when more interested.

Level 100 Description: Introductory and overview material. Assumes little or no expertise with topic and covers topic concepts, functions, features, and benefits.

Level 200: Intermediate material. Assumes 100-level knowledge and provides specific details about the topic.

Level 300: Advanced material. Assumes 200-level knowledge, in-depth understanding of features in a real-world environment.

Level 400: Expert material. Assumes a deep level of technical knowledge and experience and a detailed.