> Take the bits you want (money, skills)

That’s exactly what the author did, and it’s why the leveling piece matters so much.

At big tech companies levels very directly control comp, and less directly control the scope of problems you’re trusted with.

You absolutely can tackle large, high-impact problems as a more junior IC, but it usually means pushing a lot harder to hold onto ownership. Otherwise it’s REAL easy for a more senior IC to step in and quietly take it over.

▲

mgaunard 8 hours ago | parent [-]

It might be nicer to go work for startups, acquire experience there as you build everything from scratch across the whole stack, then get hired at a high responsibility position.

Though most people into entrepreneurship never go back to big corporations usually.

▲

kace91 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>acquire experience there as you build everything from scratch across the whole stack

This is not usually how it works. In fact in my experience, the moment a company becomes a scaleup and brings new leadership in to handle growth, those people start getting rid of the hacky jack of all trades profiles.

Larger companies usually value specialized profiles. They don’t benefit from someone half assing 20 roles, they have the budget to get 20 experts to whole ass one role each.

Career paths in large companies usually have some variation of “I’m the go-to expert for a specific area” as a bullet point somewhere.

	▲	ehnto 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Smaller companies necessarily have a small team stretched across broad responsibilities, that usually describes startups. If it's scaling up then yeah, that changes. You want to join small teams for broad experience, startup or regular business.

▲

BoxFour 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Big tech companies are also notorious for down-leveling if you’re not coming from another big company, so it might not actually be that good of a move.

▲

mgaunard 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Well of course, if you were CTO of a company of 10, you can't expect to be hired as CTO of Google.

▲

BoxFour 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

My first manager at a big tech co was the CTO of a 500 person company. He was down-leveled to being a first-level manager.

▲

dylan604 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is why titles on biz cards are funny.

	▲	ghaff 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Most of my titles have been pretty made-up (with acquiescence of manager). Never had the formal levels seen at large tech companies. Last job description was written for me and didn't even make a lot of sense if you squinted to hard. Made a couple of iterations for business cards over time. Couldn't have told you what the HR titles were in general.