It all depends, I worked for New Relic, and Lew Cirne was known as the "Coding CEO": https://allthingsd.com/20131024/you-wont-believe-what-new-relic-ceo-lew-ci

It all depends, I worked for New Relic, and Lew Cirne was known as the "Coding CEO": https://allthingsd.com/20131024/you-wont-believe-what-new-relic-ceo-lew-cirne-did-on-his-summer-vacation/ https://allthingsd.com/20131024/you-wont-believe-what-new-re... The real question with title is less what your job responsibilities are and more how broad your impact is. A High level person can be good if the project is tough in some way - requires a lot of cross team collaboration, lots of market risk, specific technical domain etc. New things are hard, think about the fact that a high level execs at one company could be software engineers or "low level" IC's at a young startup. But it should definitely be intentional.