Just browsing through postings at Netflix and Facebook it seems like there are none of these roles. Effectively, that means anyone over 30 has to be either a manager or a really overexperienced midlevel dev. Does this match what you've seen?
Haven’t really seen tech lead as an official title anywhere. Usually its L4/L4 senior/principal and the job duties will include tech leadership without saying
Agree. Tech lead isn’t so much a title as a role—one usually earned/assumed through displayed leadership rather than conferred by management.
The problem is that if the job title isn't clear then I am not going to risk applying for something that might be below my level. Senior can mean anything from a programmer a few years out of school to the chief architect. And even the roles they label as leads end up not being leads.
Most of the big tech companies these days still want hands-on architects. As a way of filtering out armchair architects, most job postings will list those hands-on skills (e.g., hands-on-keyboard coding) and most loops will test for them. But in practice, a very senior IC will end up devoting much less time to coding (except for super technically deep/specialized/company-spanning work), and much more time to tech or product leadership. It’s just not well reflected in job postings.
The problem is that, as I am applying as a architect, I am being redirected not for lacking skills but because they consider what I do management.
And that very well may be the case. People have different expectations for architects and managers across companies. Do you know specifically what qualities you seem to be missing to be considered an architect at these companies?
Back in the days Microsoft had Development Lead (not sure if they have it now). Google still has TLM. In 2007 I had official title Development Lead and I knew a lot other companies who had this title in their organogram. However now a days it's more of a role than a title.
Google actually does have architect openings, just not many and very specialized. I applied for one.
I don't know about Google's architect opening, but I'm assuming it could be cloud solutions architect or something like that for GCP. I believe they are more like sales engineering.
Not true at all. Very senior ICs are tech leads or architects indeed!
Perhaps at LinkedIn. Maybe I should try there.