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.
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.
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 :)
Instead you become a generalist which is only really needed at tiny organizations.
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.
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.
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.
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?
This is what I did in some interviews already. But maybe I can adapt my CV a little as well.
The problem is, "scope" is often equated to "how many people worked in my empire" rather than "how much business value did my work X generate".
The two things are vastly different, and I have seen the distinction/oversimplification play out over and over in my own career as well as many others around me.
As an extreme on the "individual technical expert side", there are things out there that can pretty much only be accomplished with a few people around the world who possess the dedicated expertise. These results can't be replicated by a cobbled together team of 10 or 100 people even though the latter sounds more impressive for "scope".
Some organizations do a decent job of recognizing these different "archetypes", many don't.
When looking for a manager type, people under management are a decent proxy. When looking for the world's greatest postgres optimization expert, some version of queries-per-second is prob the metric you want.
Or realistically if I needed the world's greatest Postgres expert (and could afford them), I would go talk to experts in the field and ask "Who's the best postgres person you know?" and work from there. At that point your resume is but a formality.
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.