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

> 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.

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elevatortrim 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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Swizec 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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lazyasciiart 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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Retric 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Big organizations need generalists too.

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zelphirkalt an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> 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?

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array_key_first 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.