Member of the forward-deployed GTM engineering chief of staff
The future of startup jobs and how to fit in
The status hunger games in startup titles
Our capitalist society is obsessed with making up new jobs, new titles, new ways to establish hierarchies and and motivate workers. To make them feel more important in the corporate industrial complex. This is extremely true in startups today.
Jobs that have existed for many years are getting rebranded towards higher importance and status, and towards being more “technical”.
Every role involving customers is suddenly “forward deployed”. Marketing has rebranded as “growth” so that boys feel comfortable doing it. “Engineer” is added to any job title really (“GTM engineering”) so it feels more technical. The “chief of staff” title was pulled from politics and the military to create a founder sidekick super-role and to make it feel more inspiring to fill out SOC2 documents. Engineers and researchers at AI labs are “members of the technical staff” (MTS). Some role titles are even just broadened to make extremely murky what exactly people work on; “building” is the new hot Linkedin job title used by many startup operators.
While this is kind of funny - and frustrating to those who loved the jobs before they were cool - it also makes sense for many reasons. The jobs stay the same fundamentally. Marketing is still about driving top-of-funnel awareness and the CEO’s assistant still gives them leverage regardless of the name - but technology is shifting the dynamics around these jobs:
As the technology landscape changes, certain parts of the startup value chain gain monetary value. As LLMs commoditise software development, value shifts from coding to distribution (i.e., marketing and sales). As a result, more strong talent is needed in the latter fields - time to rebrand them to a higher-status titles such that more people feel validated doing them.
Automation is indeed making all fundamentally unchanged jobs more technical. While the end-goal is the same, the approach to the work is shifting towards more automation. Rebranding roles can thus help clarify the AI-first expectations.
The rise of “personal brands”. External titles matter more than ever. Your LinkedIn title is your status business card. Titles must thus be even cooler - or broad beyond recognition - than they ever were before.
Here is my - very rough - attempt of an overview of jobs in a startup and their recent status development. I also included some rebranding examples. Marketing, for example, was traditionally a lower-status job (the bubble thus only one-quarter filled). It is now having a huge renaissance, as awareness around the importance of distribution increases. Thus, the status arrow is pointing straight upwards. It is also being rebranded, in many hot companies, to “growth”.
This chart is very WIP and meant for illustration and entertainment purposes :)
The future of tech jobs is in the HOW
I predict that it will matter less what you do exactly. It will matter HOW you do it. Yoni Rechtman of Slow Ventures in a stroke of genius identified 4 main types of jobs; Slop Cannons, SREs, Hot People, and Adults - which became a viral tweet.
What is so genius here is that these are not really jobs - they are ways of working. You will find each of these archetypes in any function. For example, you will need adults in the management team, but also in the IT team.
“Adults” here is not about age, but about an attitude; a talent for finding and flagging irresponsible ideas and being a voice of reason.
My prediction is that future jobs will be unique cross-functional mixes of traditional roles, with each person bringing their magical “how” to the job. For example, there might be two people leading talent acquisition together. One is the “hot person” who is a great human API towards new hires. The other is the SRE who makes sure nothing breaks and no mess-ups happen i.e., makes sure follow-ups are sent, automations are in place, feedback forms are filled out promptly, etc.
IC company culture
I am seeing another shift - away from hierarchies and towards “individual contributor” (IC) work cultures. I predict managing a team will become lower status and being an IC will rise in coolness. Influence and power will come from results rather than hierarchy. An IC who drives outcomes will have more say in the org in the future than the person with the C-level title. Executive teams will re-arrange accordingly.
Naval said it best in his famous “HOW TO GET RICH” tweet storm.
AI gives the leverage you could previously only get from managing a large team. Now the agents are your team. With AI agents as your leverage, you can directly drive results without needing permission like being given a large team or tons of capital to manage.
There is another form of leverage next to AI, of course, as mentioned by Naval; Media. Driving eyeballs will be the other way to get power. I predict that the person hosting the company podcast, or the corporate influencer, may soon have more power in a company than the CMO. Hi Professor Hannah Fry of Google Deepmind :)
Against this backdrop, it is also really no wonder that TBPN was acquired by OpenAI - even if they “just” became marketing ICs at OpenAI, the hefty price tag could become worth it. Podcasting… not so gauche anymore.
We are already seeing this trend take hold in some of the hottest companies. Vibe coding decacorn Cursor is known to be title-free and IC-driven (the Colossus article by Brie Wolfson highlights some of this vibe). Voice AI decacorn Eleven Labs removed all titles in their org in 2024. There are all kinds of issues and readjustments with this, but the trend is there.
Non-negotiable startup skills
As AI increasingly takes hold, anyone can vibecode a prototype, anyone can automate a process, anyone can analyse simple data.
Therefore, there will be an expectation that nobody should ever be “non-technical” if they want to be successful in tech companies. Even without a degree in computer science; from hereon out, everyone will be expected to know their way around technology. From seamlessly being able to use any tool, to using LLMs effectively, wrangling APIs, setting up automations, etc. - the “when in doubt, AI-fy it” mindset will be table stakes.
That said, while some of us excel most in training AI models or writing backend code, others spike in more human-facing work.
The second highest-value skill in any startup will be identifying and acting on alpha. When everyone has access to all information at all times and can automate anything away, the remaining skill is finding and actioning the outlier opportunities quickly - before everyone else also finds them. Cold outreach may soon be dead, as inboxes get flooded with slop - whoever finds the next best but underutilized alternative and milks it before everyone else finds out - and does so repeatedly - will win.
The risk and issue
How we brand certain jobs matters a lot to how human labor - and thereby careers and livelihoods - get allocated.
As we rebrand and up-status certain roles, they are often also masculinized in the process - to make them more appealing to men, who make up a large part of the tech workforce. Miranda, a Tiktok creator, summarised this super well in a recent video. In particular, she pointed out that this has happened before: “programming” was initially a clerical task mainly performed by secretaries. It was seen as “soft work” as opposed to the hard work done by men in manufacturing jobs. Once the personal computer arrived, and the monetary value of programming became clear, programming was rebranded to software engineering and was associated with an image of highly intelligent genius… men. This rebranding over time actually discouraged women from entering the field, driving them out of a high-earning job category.
It’s kind of sad and honestly cringe that - once a job proves to be a moneymaker - we reframe it towards masculinity.
If marketing meets the same fate - it will soon no longer be seen as a “frilly nonsense girly” job, but an intellectual and technical feat best suited for data-driven male science nerds. This is dangerous as it can exacerbate inequality. Let’s all pay close attention - both to how we talk down to certain currently not-so-hot jobs, and how we reframe roles, making them non-inclusive.
@mirandadoesbrandsWhy are marketing jobs are being rebranded using masculinised, technical language and how does this compare to what happened with software engineering in the 80a? #marketing #marketingcareers #ai
IC-first cultures also have their downside and will take adjustment. Without ladders to climb, workers can feel less motivated. Attracting talent with no titles and IC-only culture can be tough. Hierarchies currently do still matter - for the personal branding reason mentioned earlier. Focus on “personal impact” can lead to a culture where everyone looks to do the “highest visibility” work.
So what to do about it
My advice for job seekers and future startup operators: Don’t focus on the title or the branding of your role, focus on your leverage:
Is the company you work at truly a rocketship? Spend an irrational amount of time in due diligence to answer this question for yourself.
Your equity package. Your title or role will matter less than the share of the outcome you own. Equity is also a great temperature check for how highly valued your role is.
What exactly you get to work on - Is it in your zone of genius such that you can add maximum value?
Are you in the room where decisions are made?
Figure out which of the 4 job categories you fall into - and lean into it.
Learn to have a technical mindset (never ever view yourself as “non-technical”
) and learn to identify and act on alpha, quickly.
That’s all for now!
xx, P
Hurtful but true xD Here's Legal engineer for you
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kirschkatie_harvey-is-hiring-a-legal-engineer-yes-activity-7452078994843258880-7VKg
great one! i used to joke that fde is a rebranded key account manager