[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.