As a hiring manager, this is completely accurate. I don't look at your title, I look at your scope. Tell me what you did, for whom, and what was the impact. That's all I care about.
We all know that Senior Principal Architect Engineer at 3-person startup is somewhere around junior to mid-level at a real company. Whereas some poor schmuck at a larger company with a title like "Senior Engineer I" probably owns and runs more impressive systems and works with more stakeholders than that 3-person startup will see in a year.
Maybe. That's why you need to put your scope on the resume :)
I had a CTO title 15 years ago. The complexity of what we were building was a joke compared to what I own now as a lowly "tech lead manager". And in fact back then I wouldn't even be able to comprehend how complex things can get.
The problem is, "scope" is often equated to "how many people worked in my empire" rather than "how much business value did my work X generate".
The two things are vastly different, and I have seen the distinction/oversimplification play out over and over in my own career as well as many others around me.
As an extreme on the "individual technical expert side", there are things out there that can pretty much only be accomplished with a few people around the world who possess the dedicated expertise. These results can't be replicated by a cobbled together team of 10 or 100 people even though the latter sounds more impressive for "scope".
Some organizations do a decent job of recognizing these different "archetypes", many don't.
I can't know you ran a 30 person scale up unless you tell me. It doesn't have to be in those words exactly, usually it's tied to ARR or rounds raised or something you can easily talk about that translates across companies.
I've seen resumes with titles like "Lead Engineer" who under that title put something like "Hired 45+ people to run <huge systems> at <company you've heard of>". That person has more scope than the 30-people CTO in your example :)
PS: 30 people isn't even that many for a whole company. That's a Series A startup with early signs of product-market-fit. It's common to see a ratio of 10 employees for every 1 engineer in the company.
Instead you become a generalist which is only really needed at tiny organizations.
At FANG size companies have people to setup 401k and health insurance, tiny startups need 1 of 3 people to figure that out even if it just means finding a company to outsource such things it still needs to happen. Payroll doesn’t need to be a complex system but taxes must be paid etc.
No I mean
> Tell me what you did, for whom, what was the impact.
It's really that simple. Just tell me what you did at your job. What was it that you worked on. Why did it matter. Did you own a workstream (or 5), code monkey all day, own a critical service, play code janitor, ... what did you do?
In my experience distribution of engineer quality is even across companies, countries, ages and any other dimension we can come up. Certain big scale skills can really only be practiced at honed at large tech companies, but it’s always a small minority that actually make those things happen. Resume alone can be an extremely misleading signal.
This is complicated during acquisitions… you have a new company coming in and leveling them is hard because it’s a mass title migration exercise, and nobody wants to be down-titled.
In the 2 examples I’ve seen gone wrong:
-the people at the parent company look at the acquisition’s team and think, “there’s no way this idiot should be a director.”
-the people at the startup think they’re geniuses because they got acquired but their tech is crap and they’re actually just 28 year olds running around without adult supervision
-the startup guys will all leave once they vest or be pushed out for being lousy
-the tech gets even more unstable because no one left knows how the code works
Titles are fungible, but your comp isn't. Don't let a company sell you on a better title for less comp, especially when the JD or role doesn't align with the title; the next place won't give a shit what your title was if all you did was Junior-level work because you bought into someone else's narrative rather than control your own.
A few teams have a "lead" role, but its mostly ceremonial.
Failed to design Quantum Lattice Bloom Cascade algorithm in 5 minutes?
For a good interviewer these people are obvious even without any coding tests.