Though most people into entrepreneurship never go back to big corporations usually.
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.
To do so, one good way is to hire the experts of that domain that have built it before. That can mean acquiring a small specialized company, or simply hiring its top talent.
You could also repurpose your existing staff, but a big company is unlikely to have a lot of "builders", as most of its staff is just iterating and maintaining things others have built a decade ago. You probably still want to have some of those people in the team anyway, for integration purposes.
He was down-leveled to a first level manager at the company you are at? He accepted this? Why? Do you think he / the new company chose wisely? What ended up happening?
He was a great manager, he’s since moved up the ranks but he’s still at the same big tech co. So from both the company’s and his perspective, I suppose everyone’s happy.
> 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
You mostly don’t get hired into high responsibility positions at big tech from startups, unless you’re acquired by them directly.
There are some notable exceptions obviously, but those generally require you to be some sort of leading domain expert.
Couldn't have told you what the HR titles were in general.
I didn't know numbers, but I came to know that he was earning X and as I asked the company for him to stay he got at least 1.7X
Then I learned how much X was and I got said with my own salary
After a while, I've got a new job and they offered 1.7X for me even after I received a 1.5X increase.
First I was happy that they were at least trying to hold me, but then I realized that my base salary was probably just too low LOL
And those “entrepreneurs” usually make less than a senior enterprise dev working in a 2nd tier city or a new grad at BigTech.