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.