If a company claims to have “parallel and equal tracks” ask them how many VP equivalent individual contributors they have and how many manager VPs they have. Ask then what the CEO-equivalent individual contributor role entails.
This gets pretty tricky at some point, because there are a lot of hybrid people. The "standard" image of a VP is someone who has multiple directors reporting to them, and probably 50+ (really 100+) indirect reports. So what about a VP-equivalent with 5 direct reports who are all ICs? That person isn't an IC, but they're also not really a people manager, they're like a really high impact TLM. Do they count more as the first, or the second?
