What is "Director Level"?

Part 2 - Do you has director level?

What do I mean by "Director Level"?

Every industry and every company has their own version of job titles. In technology we have some of the most inconsistent job titles of any career. It can make navigating your career very challenging. For example, JP Morgan routinely advertises "Vice President - Software Engineer". Go read the actual job. It's just a senior software engineer. At that same company they will advertise for Managing Director, Executive Director, and Director. These are all higher than the Vice President - Software Engineer. In fact, you probably see these roles as Vice President, Director, and Manager anywhere else. I worked at a place where Senior Director, Director, and Senior Manager were all the same job, just different levels of seniority. Another place was advertising Associate Director, which is just a manager. So on and so forth.

By my definition a "Director Level" position is someone who 

- Is managing multiple teams

- MAY be managing other managers

- Owns an application or multiple applications including strategic direction, troubleshooting, and operations

- MAY own the budget of the applications

Not all director level positions manage other managers but they will have extreme ownership of their area and they are likely running multiple teams even if it's multiple team leads dividing up the work.

Although there may be different job titles and even layers to these the closest "standard" we have for a development career is

Junior Level

Mid-Level

Senior Level and/or Team Lead

Manager

Director

Executive

C-Level (Chief Technology Officer or Chief Information Officer)

You'll note I didn't include Architect because that is actually a different path. I've worked at places with 6 different levels of software engineer, 3 different manager levels, or even as many as 4 different executive layers (which, ironically, was not at the largest company I've worked at). However, most everything breaks down this way and most technology career paths follow a similar structure aside from there not being much in the way of junior level architects, agile coaches, or other positions that usually take some expertise or leadership even at the early stages.

To make it even more challenging, everything past "Senior-Level" is optional. I've worked at or know of companies that are missing one or multiple levels of management, especially at smaller companies. We can argue about this all day long in terms of effectiveness but I know it is out there. 

So with this context we can start talking about how I went about finding that next role.

Read Part 1 Here - Intro