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Re:Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level by jedberg on Monday January 06, 2020 @03:49AM (#21967648)
> both have career tracks for IC which go up to ‘Distinguished Engineer’ level, and where compensation can be equivalent to a VP on the management track.

Sure, it exists. How many DEs do you know of, vs. VPs?

How do you get a DE job? Usually you are the most well known person in your field.

How you do you get a VP job? You have to be a pretty good manager.

At Google, there are 100s of VPs. There are maybe 10 DEs, if that many.

That's the BS. It's like saying "there is totally a path to getting really rich as an actor!". Sure, there is a path, but not a lot of people make it. And even the ones that do usually get there by also doing the management path (producer) at the same time.

The lie is in the claim it's just as easy to climb the DE ladder as it is the VP ladder.

It's not. Not even close.

Re:Top Paying Tech Companies by SWE Level by joshuamorton on Monday January 06, 2020 @04:29AM (#21967809)
> At Google, there are 100s of VPs. There are maybe 10 DEs, if that many

Fwiw, the number is significantly higher than 10, though still fewer than there are VPs.

That said, things get tricky: there are DEs who have reports, and there are VPs with no (or trivial, like 3) reports. But either way, if your metric is DE/VP or if it's manager of a large org vs IC/TLM, the number of IC-track people is higher than you suggest.