Comment by Swizec
9 hours ago
> When hiring, titles are basically ignored
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.
I think that engineering at a large organisation and engineering at a startup are two completely different disciplines with very little crossover.
Interesting, you've got it absolutely the wrong way around.
The engineer at the startup may have a broad scope of responsibility and ownership, but also might be working on relatively small systems that have not needed to scale yet.
> Interesting, you've got it absolutely the wrong way around.
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.
> That's why you need to put your scope
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.
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That may be your anecdote but CTO at a 30-50 person scale up would typically have much more management/accounting/signature/high-stake conversation/... experience than a senior developer at google.
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Well, what do you even mean by "put your scope on the resume"? Do you mean literally "Scope: blabla" for each occupation? Or do you mean something more implicit?
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There's a lot of cogs at big companies, but the impact of the entire company is huge. Startups usually have small impact. Usually at these big companies there's quite a few atlases holding the entire world up.
Sure also in big companies there are plenty of places for low performers to survive by owning some very small and rigid scope that doesn’t require any real end-to-end thinking.
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.