[Aurornis]

> that it really depends on the organisation.

This is entirely it. Titles should be consistently ordered within an organization, but they are not portable from one organization to another.

This is a lesson I’ve had to explain over and over to people at the beginning of their careers. I’ve been asked for advice about which offer to take from people thinking about leaving 10s of thousands of dollars on the table because another company will give them a Senior Engineer title and they think that’s important.

When hiring, titles are basically ignored unless the person is coming from a company like Microsoft or Google where their leveling system is publicly known.

I’ve interviewed so many “Prinicpal Staff Engineers” or even “CTO” people who would barely qualify as senior engineers at an average company. I’ve also interviewed “Senior Software Engineers” who had more experience than knowledge than anyone on our teams (and that’s saying a lot!)

Hiring managers know this, but it’s not obvious if you haven’t done a lot of hiring or worked at a lot of different companies.

[Swizec]

> When hiring, titles are basically ignored

As a hiring manager, this is completely accurate. I don't look at your title, I look at your scope. Tell me what you did, for whom, and what was the impact. That's all I care about.

We all know that Senior Principal Architect Engineer at 3-person startup is somewhere around junior to mid-level at a real company. Whereas some poor schmuck at a larger company with a title like "Senior Engineer I" probably owns and runs more impressive systems and works with more stakeholders than that 3-person startup will see in a year.

[democracy]

Interesting, you've got it absolutely the wrong way around.

[Swizec]

> Interesting, you've got it absolutely the wrong way around.

Maybe. That's why you need to put your scope on the resume :)

I had a CTO title 15 years ago. The complexity of what we were building was a joke compared to what I own now as a lowly "tech lead manager". And in fact back then I wouldn't even be able to comprehend how complex things can get.

[gajjanag]

> That's why you need to put your scope

The problem is, "scope" is often equated to "how many people worked in my empire" rather than "how much business value did my work X generate".

The two things are vastly different, and I have seen the distinction/oversimplification play out over and over in my own career as well as many others around me.

As an extreme on the "individual technical expert side", there are things out there that can pretty much only be accomplished with a few people around the world who possess the dedicated expertise. These results can't be replicated by a cobbled together team of 10 or 100 people even though the latter sounds more impressive for "scope".

Some organizations do a decent job of recognizing these different "archetypes", many don't.

[Swizec]

I agree. What counts as a positive signal for "scope" really very much depends what you're hiring for.

When looking for a manager type, people under management are a decent proxy. When looking for the world's greatest postgres optimization expert, some version of queries-per-second is prob the metric you want.

Or realistically if I needed the world's greatest Postgres expert (and could afford them), I would go talk to experts in the field and ask "Who's the best postgres person you know?" and work from there. At that point your resume is but a formality.

[elevatortrim]

That may be your anecdote but CTO at a 30-50 person scale up would typically have much more management/accounting/signature/high-stake conversation/... experience than a senior developer at google.

[Swizec]

Yes. Which is why it's important to put scope on your resume.

I can't know you ran a 30 person scale up unless you tell me. It doesn't have to be in those words exactly, usually it's tied to ARR or rounds raised or something you can easily talk about that translates across companies.

I've seen resumes with titles like "Lead Engineer" who under that title put something like "Hired 45+ people to run <huge systems> at <company you've heard of>". That person has more scope than the 30-people CTO in your example :)

PS: 30 people isn't even that many for a whole company. That's a Series A startup with early signs of product-market-fit. It's common to see a ratio of 10 employees for every 1 engineer in the company.

[calculatte]

An unverifiable line item on a resume gives you real insight on an individual's experience and skills? I think your system is flawed.

[lazyasciiart]

But that's nothing to do with the comparison he made, which was "at 3-person startup"

[Retric]

When you swap between 9 hats, you don’t get meaningful experience at any of those roles.

Instead you become a generalist which is only really needed at tiny organizations.

[ozim]

Big organizations need generalists too.

[zelphirkalt]

Well, what do you even mean by "put your scope on the resume"? Do you mean literally "Scope: blabla" for each occupation? Or do you mean something more implicit?

[Swizec]

> Do you mean literally "Scope: blabla" for each occupation?

No I mean

> Tell me what you did, for whom, what was the impact.

It's really that simple. Just tell me what you did at your job. What was it that you worked on. Why did it matter. Did you own a workstream (or 5), code monkey all day, own a critical service, play code janitor, ... what did you do?

[zelphirkalt]

Ah OK, gotcha, thanks.

This is what I did in some interviews already. But maybe I can adapt my CV a little as well.

[array_key_first]

There's a lot of cogs at big companies, but the impact of the entire company is huge. Startups usually have small impact. Usually at these big companies there's quite a few atlases holding the entire world up.

[dasil003]

Sure also in big companies there are plenty of places for low performers to survive by owning some very small and rigid scope that doesn’t require any real end-to-end thinking.

In my experience distribution of engineer quality is even across companies, countries, ages and any other dimension we can come up. Certain big scale skills can really only be practiced at honed at large tech companies, but it’s always a small minority that actually make those things happen. Resume alone can be an extremely misleading signal.

[jimbokun]

The engineer at the startup may have a broad scope of responsibility and ownership, but also might be working on relatively small systems that have not needed to scale yet.

[marcus_holmes]

I think that engineering at a large organisation and engineering at a startup are two completely different disciplines with very little crossover.

[stego-tech]

This is why I align on comp ranges rather than title. I've been a "Lead" where all I contributed was a new imaging pipeline and introducing NAT to the product line, a "Manager" of a failing company where I had no managerial authority or direct reports, and a "Senior" at a SV firm where I actually behaved a level above a Senior Engineer - owning outcomes, doing research, mentoring juniors, building relationships across silos, governance councils, etc.

Titles are fungible, but your comp isn't. Don't let a company sell you on a better title for less comp, especially when the JD or role doesn't align with the title; the next place won't give a shit what your title was if all you did was Junior-level work because you bought into someone else's narrative rather than control your own.

[icedchai]

I've worked with several "Directors" that all had between 0 and 3 reports. Vanity titles make people feel good and look nice on a resume, but that's about it.

[madeofpalk]

"Lead" is a funny one, because its just not a level that exists where I currently work.

A few teams have a "lead" role, but its mostly ceremonial.

[Esophagus4]

100%

This is complicated during acquisitions… you have a new company coming in and leveling them is hard because it’s a mass title migration exercise, and nobody wants to be down-titled.

In the 2 examples I’ve seen gone wrong:

-the people at the parent company look at the acquisition’s team and think, “there’s no way this idiot should be a director.”

-the people at the startup think they’re geniuses because they got acquired but their tech is crap and they’re actually just 28 year olds running around without adult supervision

-the startup guys will all leave once they vest or be pushed out for being lousy

-the tech gets even more unstable because no one left knows how the code works

[nradov]

In pretty much any software startup acquisition by a much larger company, even if they do technical due diligence up front they have to assume that all the code will need to be rewritten within a couple years. It's good to keep a few key technical resources around during the transition period but otherwise a high attrition level is acceptable.

[democracy]

>> I’ve interviewed so many “Prinicpal Staff Engineers” or even “CTO” people who would barely qualify as senior engineers at an average company

Failed to design Quantum Lattice Bloom Cascade algorithm in 5 minutes?

[Aurornis]

More like: Couldn't cite anything they accomplished and had no real responsibilities.

For a good interviewer these people are obvious even without any coding tests.