At least half of the startups that I worked with in the past 10 years, haven’t considered EM or Staff roles at 50 people or less. They instead opted for VPs, Head of’s, Principals and Seniors only, the argument being that it is too early for roles and responsibility granularity you expressed above.
At least half of the startups that I worked with in the past 10 years, haven’t considered EM or Staff roles at 50 people or less. They instead opted for VPs, Head of’s, Principals and Seniors only, the argument being that it is too early for roles and responsibility granularity you expressed above.
Now I’m not saying that I advocate for such governance, but this was what the past practice taught me, and I’m open to learn from other’s experience.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I haven't worked at Startups (except my own 2-man startup) but I keep hearing Startups suffer from title inflation.
To me, each role should have a concrete definition. I have a series on career ladder anti-patterns that I'll publish during 2025 (hopefully) but here are some points in that series that try to clarify the role of Senior, Staff, and Principal engineer:
I've been drafting an article for Distinguished Engineer in that series and an article that glues all of them together elaborating the purpose and structure of a career ladder with some examples.
At least half of the startups that I worked with in the past 10 years, haven’t considered EM or Staff roles at 50 people or less. They instead opted for VPs, Head of’s, Principals and Seniors only, the argument being that it is too early for roles and responsibility granularity you expressed above.
Now I’m not saying that I advocate for such governance, but this was what the past practice taught me, and I’m open to learn from other’s experience.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I haven't worked at Startups (except my own 2-man startup) but I keep hearing Startups suffer from title inflation.
To me, each role should have a concrete definition. I have a series on career ladder anti-patterns that I'll publish during 2025 (hopefully) but here are some points in that series that try to clarify the role of Senior, Staff, and Principal engineer:
https://blog.alexewerlof.com/p/introduction-to-the-role-of-staff
https://blog.alexewerlof.com/p/senior-engineer-to-staff-engineer
https://blog.alexewerlof.com/p/principal-engineer
I've been drafting an article for Distinguished Engineer in that series and an article that glues all of them together elaborating the purpose and structure of a career ladder with some examples.