[mmt]

That particular one, "career progression" only seems to apply to those who consider it a progression to move into management. That seems to be a minority opinion among engineers, but, more importantly, there are far fewer management roles than engineering ones, especially at a startup.

[muzani]

I was going to say that there's career progression towards being a 10x programmer too. But that's a much more debatable topic.

You get more flexibility to take on multiple roles. More pressure driving you forward. Much, much less bureaucracy to worry about. No more 2 month discussions over code that takes 2 weeks to write.

The downside is that you could get tied up putting out fires, being unfocused. And there's little room for deliberate training.

[mmt]

Indeed, all of this are debatable, and the article only specifically mentions "rise up through the ranks", which means management.

Of course, even that's a questionable proposition. It calls out the youth of a Chief Product Officer at Facebook, which may well be cherry-picking/selection-bias.

As I've researched the managers at startups I consider working for, I routinely see on LinkedIn profiles that a high "rank" at a startup turns into a much lower one when an individual moves to a much larger company, though it does tend to go back up once that individual returns to startup work.