[Hermitian909]

> Referring to the "small startup experience" not mattering - I would say it is almost like an alternate track as an engineer.

It can be but doesn't have to be. A lot of people prefer to hire folks with some small startup experience because such people almost always better at thinking about businesses holistically. Many people who spend their entire careers at big companies can only reason about their little slice (lots of bad takes on businesses here).

A common way to make VP of engineering at big tech is the following 5 job hops:

1. Manager at big tech

2. Manager at startup -> promotion to director

3. Director at big tech

4. Director at startup -> promotion to VP

5. VP at big tech

The problem comes when someone gets too senior with relevant experience at scale. I (generally) can't hire someone with 15 years of experience who's never worked at scale. They're going to be bored out of their mind with mid-level work but simultaneously I can't actually trust them to not screw up something in senior+ roles, either technically or socially.

[ryandrake]

Titles in startups really don't map meaningfully to titles in BigTech. You can be called a VP in a startup with 20 people under you in the org chart. That empire size is equivalent to "second level manager" in a FAANG, and FAANGs know this. When FAANG acquires a startup with 20 people, MAYBE the CEO gets a nice title, but most of the startup's acquired employees get Senior Worker Bee titles.

[Hermitian909]

I'd hoped the pre-requisite that titles matched duties was implicitly understood in the message, sorry!

But you can absolutely come into an engineering role at a company with 40 engineers (40 person org charts to director at BigTech), grow into leadership of a 200+ person engineering (charts to vp) and then go back to BigTech for bigger bucks.