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Comment by BoxFour | Hacker News Reader

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.

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

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.

There is so much interesting to unpack here.

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?

I’m not sure why he accepted it, I never pried too much. It was his first big tech job. It’s very possible he still made more money as a first-level manager, so it might’ve still been a net win for him.

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.

Wouldn't be surprised if it was money. My family member runs a software company, salaries came up recently and found out I make as much as their director.

It is quite common for CTOs of smaller companies to be hired as team leaders into bigger companies; nothing wrong with that.

I agree. My point is this is probably unrealistic:

> 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.

It’s wrong if it’s a 500 person tech company. There are divisions in big tech which don’t have 500 people in them.

It depends on how many people he was in charge of. If he’s CTO of 500 people company where only 40 are engineers, you’re not getting past senior manager at faang.

This is why titles on biz cards are funny.

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.

Once a person where I was tech lead asked to leave because he told me his salary wasn't enough.

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

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