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.
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.
It gives me more insight than a blank resume with just job titles.
The rest we can hash out in interviews, reference checks, and reaching out to mutual network connections at higher levels. Nobody gets hired just off their resume.
That is to say: All line items are verifiable if we care enough. Tech is small :)
Generalist means something very different for big orgs.
At FANG size companies have people to setup 401k and health insurance, tiny startups need 1 of 3 people to figure that out even if it just means finding a company to outsource such things it still needs to happen. Payroll doesn’t need to be a complex system but taxes must be paid etc.
I would say I look at it from a different angle, big companies can afford specialists. Startups cannot afford specialized employee for database administration or setting up 401k.
But big companies would definitely love to have to pay a single salary for someone who does 401k and when this job is done administrates databases then in between reviews tweets searching for mentions of the company. Exaggerated example but I hope clear.
That already shows up with everything getting „Ops” obviously DevOps but I already have seen DataOps, SalesOps and MarketingOps.
That shows an ability to figure out what needs to be done and do it, regardless of whether it fits the formal job description. That can be an invaluable skill in an organization of any size.
It’s a valuable attitude, but not a particularly valuable skill.
Expertise gains value when it can’t be subdivided. A doctor needs to know a who lot of related skills to be a heart surgeon, it doesn’t work to split it into two less demanding roles. However two generalists can sub divide the workload of a generalist with a lot more experience because experienced generalists aren’t particularly skilled at anything.
It's the story of foxes and hedgehogs... Both have a time and place. Sometimes you need people who can aggressively put out fires, and sometimes you need people with deep focus for the long haul, who aren't overly distracted by the heat.
I think when you are new with good ideas, you are judged against average. If you are above average, you are listened to.
As years pass, you are judged against the standard you set, and if you do not keep raising this standard, you start being seen as average, even if you are performing the same when you joined.
I've seen this play out many, many times.
When an incompetent person is hired, even if issues are acknowledged, if they somehow stay, the expectations from them will be set to their level. The feedback will stop as if you complain about same issues or same person's work every time, people will start seeing this as a you problem. Everyone quietly avoids this, so the person stays.
When a competent person is hired, it plays out the same. After 3/5/10 years, you are getting the same recognition and rewards as the incompetent person as long as you both maintain your competency.
However, I've seen (very few) people who consistently raised their own standards and improved their impact and they've climbed quickly.
I've seen people lowering their own standards and they were quickly flagged as under-performers, even if their reduced impact was still above average.
I agree with this summary to a degree. Additional problem arises when you simply cannot raise the standard as you lack political influence to do so. As it is said in the article - sometimes companies are comfortable with status quo, irregardless of the problems, whether they are technical or not. Another issue stems when product, rather than looking at tech as a partner in pursuit of common goal starts to see it as an underling.
That happens in times of bullish markets and growing economies. Then we want a lot of SWEs.
In times of uncertainty and things going south, that changes to we need as little SWEs as possible, hence the current narrative, everyone is looking to cut costs.
Had GPT 3 emerged 10-20 years ago, the narrative would be “you can now do 100x more thanks to AI”.
Obviously the government should be responsible to monitor these patterns and regulate them when they are becoming unhealthy at a statistical level? Having allowed the likes of facebook to grow to this point is clearly a policy failure.
This is wild. I would've thought everyone working in the company implicitly knew what they were doing without no-one needing to mention it but I can't imagine someone being so dumb as to suggesting something like sending notifications during school hours in writing. Could you link to this?
You could describe drugs the same way, no? building products to connect people to substances they enjoy? There would be no fraud and deception too.
This is not about Alice liking or disliking it. This is about allowing Mark to engineer a system where statistically too many Bob's and Charlie's can't refuse (for the same reasons gambling is more common in poor communities), making the society worse off at a result.
The problem is, between producing cigarettes, weapons, disposable fashion, sugary food and drink, disposable vapes, extremely wasteful cars, addicting game mechanics, many of the financial "product"s, ad optimisation, ..., not everyone can avoid immoral but legal work whilst trying to exist in this economy.
> not everyone can avoid immoral but legal work whilst trying to exist in this economy
We're talking about software engineers here, not "cleaner taking up any job you can". Literally one of the most well paid jobs considering the amount of effort you put into it. People slave away on fields picking berries for less, with more impact on their life expectancy, if there is any career you can almost jump between jobs in just a few weeks, software engineering is one of them.
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