Comment by Swizec
7 hours ago
> 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.
I agree. What counts as a positive signal for "scope" really very much depends what you're hiring for.
When looking for a manager type, people under management are a decent proxy. When looking for the world's greatest postgres optimization expert, some version of queries-per-second is prob the metric you want.
Or realistically if I needed the world's greatest Postgres expert (and could afford them), I would go talk to experts in the field and ask "Who's the best postgres person you know?" and work from there. At that point your resume is but a formality.
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.
Yes. Which is why it's important to put scope on your resume.
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.
An unverifiable line item on a resume gives you real insight on an individual's experience and skills? I think your system is flawed.
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But that's nothing to do with the comparison he made, which was "at 3-person startup"
When you swap between 9 hats, you don’t get meaningful experience at any of those roles.
Instead you become a generalist which is only really needed at tiny organizations.
Big organizations need generalists too.
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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?
> Do you mean literally "Scope: blabla" for each occupation?
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?