It might be nicer to go work for startups, acquire experience there as you build everything from scratch across the whole stack, then get hired at a high responsibility position.

Though most people into entrepreneurship never go back to big corporations usually.

>acquire experience there as you build everything from scratch across the whole stack

This is not usually how it works. In fact in my experience, the moment a company becomes a scaleup and brings new leadership in to handle growth, those people start getting rid of the hacky jack of all trades profiles.

Larger companies usually value specialized profiles. They don’t benefit from someone half assing 20 roles, they have the budget to get 20 experts to whole ass one role each.

Career paths in large companies usually have some variation of “I’m the go-to expert for a specific area” as a bullet point somewhere.

Smaller companies necessarily have a small team stretched across broad responsibilities, that usually describes startups. If it's scaling up then yeah, that changes. You want to join small teams for broad experience, startup or regular business.

There are times where a big company needs to build something new (albeit within a constrained ecosystem and a very narrow swimming lane).

To do so, one good way is to hire the experts of that domain that have built it before. That can mean acquiring a small specialized company, or simply hiring its top talent.

You could also repurpose your existing staff, but a big company is unlikely to have a lot of "builders", as most of its staff is just iterating and maintaining things others have built a decade ago. You probably still want to have some of those people in the team anyway, for integration purposes.

It doesn't even take new leadership. As companies grow, they (have to) put more process in place, people tend to have narrower and more tightly defined responsibilities, and the person at a smaller company--even if not a startup--who was cowboying what they saw as needing doing can become a liability rather than an asset.

Big tech companies are also notorious for down-leveling if you’re not coming from another big company, so it might not actually be that good of a move.

Well of course, if you were CTO of a company of 10, you can't expect to be hired as CTO of Google.

My first manager at a big tech co was the CTO of a 500 person company. He was down-leveled to being a first-level manager.

There is so much interesting to unpack here.

He was down-leveled to a first level manager at the company you are at? He accepted this? Why? Do you think he / the new company chose wisely? What ended up happening?

I’m not sure why he accepted it, I never pried too much. It was his first big tech job.

He was a great manager, he’s since moved up the ranks but he’s still at the same big tech co.

Wouldn't be surprised if it was money. My family member runs a software company, salaries came up recently and found out I make as much as their director.

It is quite common for CTOs of smaller companies to be hired as team leaders into bigger companies; nothing wrong with that.

I agree. My point is this is probably unrealistic:

> It might be nicer to go work for startups, acquire experience there as you build everything from scratch across the whole stack, then get hired at a high responsibility position

You mostly don’t get hired into high responsibility positions at big tech from startups, unless you’re acquired by them directly.

It’s wrong if it’s a 500 person tech company. There are divisions in big tech which don’t have 500 people in them.

It depends on how many people he was in charge of. If he’s CTO of 500 people company where only 40 are engineers, you’re not getting past senior manager at faang.

This is why titles on biz cards are funny.

Most of my titles have been pretty made-up (with acquiescence of manager). Never had the formal levels seen at large tech companies. Last job description was written for me and didn't even make a lot of sense if you squinted to hard. Made a couple of iterations for business cards over time.

Couldn't have told you what the HR titles were in general.

Once a person where I was tech lead asked to leave because he told me his salary wasn't enough.

I didn't know numbers, but I came to know that he was earning X and as I asked the company for him to stay he got at least 1.7X

Then I learned how much X was and I got said with my own salary

After a while, I've got a new job and they offered 1.7X for me even after I received a 1.5X increase.

First I was happy that they were at least trying to hold me, but then I realized that my base salary was probably just too low LOL

It doesn’t work like that. An “architect” at a small startup will get you maybe to a mid level position at BigTech if you pass the coding interview. The scale is completely different.

And those “entrepreneurs” usually make less than a senior enterprise dev working in a 2nd tier city or a new grad at BigTech.