From what I can tell even with the title it doesn’t matter. I had CTO label and had our companies PMs reporting into me as well. Folks at bigger co’s just don’t seem to care and don’t put value in the experience gained from “leadership” positions in startups.
From what I can tell you can still greatly increase your career velocity as an IC by doing a startup for a few years. It quickly falls away for management roles unless your company hits a big win AND you had a very publicly facing role, in which case the career boost isn’t very needed due to the big win part.
I'm largely in the same boat. I was part of the founding team, architected our systems, wrote a good part of it, and eventually look over leadership of the engineering and product teams as the CEO had to focus on more external matters. I played the SE role on any meaningful call, worked closely with marketing, and even did sales directly a couple of times landing us an LOI at a critical time.
We had an "ok" exit, not enough to never work again by any means but it put some decent amount of money in the bank.
After riding out the acquisition for a year I've been looking for my next role and it feels like I don't fit in anyones box well enough to get the nod. Besides landing an exec position at a startup with funding, the big tech companies of the world seem like the only place to get good compensation for that expertise. From what I can tell, the big tech places don't seem to be interested in hiring people from startup-heavy backgrounds nearly as much as they used to be.
My approach is to try to reestablish some networks, and tossing resumes are interesting job listings. But the reality is that almost no one is getting hired for great roles without a warm intro to a hiring manager. Dusting off the old personal website never hurt either, it might at least let you get into the right kind of conversation after the warm intro.
It feels like I'd be in a great position to start a startup but with spouse and young kids its not the right time (especially now) to do that sort of thing.
Something that comes up in these discussions is the concept of “company time”.
Company resources is clear cut, but what is company time for a salaried employee? How does that change with being a remote employee?
I’ve moved to a strategic product role and honestly work less than an hour a day on average and seldom go into the office. If I decide to work on a side project does that restrict me from git commits between 8-5?
I'll take you up on that. I've recently started a little side project using graphql and location based data, nothing serious just sharpening up on some things that are new or that I haven't touched in a while.
I haven't found as much in the world of graphql using location based data and how the queries usually look and how the resolvers are built. Do you know of any nicely put together graphql projects with nice filters/etc available that deal primarily with location based data?
Having a kid kicked my ass in high gear as far as learning and monetizing that learning. I've been fortunate enough to have good jobs and arguable didn't "need" to do more but when I found out we were going to have a child every part of my body shifted into provider overdrive.
I started consulting, hustling, and expanding my knowledge and skillset as rapidly as I could. I started a consultancy on the side and nearly doubled my income over the course of a few months. Between that and my boy not being a very good sleeper I probably ran on an average of 4.5 hours rest a night for between 3-4 years (with once a week crashes of a long night of sleep on Fridays and Saturday afternoon nap).
It was tough, damn tough, but I made sure to spend quality time with him every night and most mornings, gave him nearly every bath during the first 2 years of his life, and got up with him every time he needed me in the night from midnight to 7am as that was my shift so the wife could sleep. During the same time I achieved an extremely high proficiency with ruby and later rails, learned to sell myself, came on as first engineer at a startup and dug deep into Elixir right around the time it hit 1.0, eventually launching a product written in it and learning a ridiculous amount about the BEAM in the process.
Theres less time to fart around with video games, and I don't have much in the way of hobbies, but little fulfillment was going to come from those areas anyway.
Its doable, and I'm alive and sane on the other side with a load of accomplishments to point to, a great relationship with my wife/son and reasonable assurance that my child(ren) will have everything they need to be successful.