I think there's a disconnect between what people expect from those job titles especially (L.E. from many US and most SV companies) if you come from companies structured differently or from across the pond. Also the language barrier maybe.
Being used to European style job titles of the time (some decades ago), imagine my surprise when I met with some vice-presidents from a big US company who turned out to be among the dozens glorified product managers the company had.
Same with tech leads where the expectation is that you are either just tech focused (best tech resource, authority on that tech in the team, still under a team lead), or less likely both team/people and tech focused (so among the best techs, and proven leadership skills).
> Given the importance of the product [...] the team was back to 4 engineers and since I was the first one, I became the Tech Lead for the product. [...] I was not even in top 3 of the team of 10 based on engineering skills
Being the first assigned to a product because nobody else was around and having your product draw the more qualified techs to you doesn't make you a lead of either kind.
A job title is relevant if it's assigned to people who proved their worth with those particular skills needed for the position (evidently not the case here). So a tech lead in FB basically means you're the first and do a decent job. In many companies this wouldn't fly because being better than your lead but not having the spot because you were not there first is a recipe for high turnover, or at least people dashing between teams and products hoping to catch that spot. But FB and other SV tech giants are juicy enough targets that rely on product attractiveness (success with users) * rather than product quality that this wouldn't be a problem. Hence they can afford to have such tech leads.
* > E6->E7 and E7->E8 promotions were mainly about making something successful. My execution could have been perfect but if the product didn’t work, I would not have been promoted.
The problem with job titles is that they are brag-tags in most companies. At the very low and very high ends they're used instead of a monetary compensation because the company can't afford to raise the salaries for all those people (poor company or very high salaries already), or because money stops mattering after a point and a pat on the back is worth more to the employee.
The post feels like an ad for "you can do it too, apply now". There's enough info there to make the person uniquely identifiable which is perhaps not the best position for our anonymous engineer.
To me if felt that the structure is similar to Google's. If you are assigned crap maintenance task, you may stay on the same level longer than you'd want. Come up with new great projects that may affect the bottom line and suddenly people throw money and resources at you.
Being used to European style job titles of the time (some decades ago), imagine my surprise when I met with some vice-presidents from a big US company who turned out to be among the dozens glorified product managers the company had.
Same with tech leads where the expectation is that you are either just tech focused (best tech resource, authority on that tech in the team, still under a team lead), or less likely both team/people and tech focused (so among the best techs, and proven leadership skills).
> Given the importance of the product [...] the team was back to 4 engineers and since I was the first one, I became the Tech Lead for the product. [...] I was not even in top 3 of the team of 10 based on engineering skills
Being the first assigned to a product because nobody else was around and having your product draw the more qualified techs to you doesn't make you a lead of either kind.
A job title is relevant if it's assigned to people who proved their worth with those particular skills needed for the position (evidently not the case here). So a tech lead in FB basically means you're the first and do a decent job. In many companies this wouldn't fly because being better than your lead but not having the spot because you were not there first is a recipe for high turnover, or at least people dashing between teams and products hoping to catch that spot. But FB and other SV tech giants are juicy enough targets that rely on product attractiveness (success with users) * rather than product quality that this wouldn't be a problem. Hence they can afford to have such tech leads.
* > E6->E7 and E7->E8 promotions were mainly about making something successful. My execution could have been perfect but if the product didn’t work, I would not have been promoted.
The problem with job titles is that they are brag-tags in most companies. At the very low and very high ends they're used instead of a monetary compensation because the company can't afford to raise the salaries for all those people (poor company or very high salaries already), or because money stops mattering after a point and a pat on the back is worth more to the employee.
The post feels like an ad for "you can do it too, apply now". There's enough info there to make the person uniquely identifiable which is perhaps not the best position for our anonymous engineer.