Experiences vary wildly so take my with a grain of salt. From what I've seen though good EM positions are acquired more from social engineering than anything else. It's all about who you know. Get to the know the right people, work at darling companies, take a risk on a startup that ends up going big, etc. Moving from a non-tech retail company sounds extremely boring to anyone interviewing you (no offense).
My personal take on this is it's very difficult to measure an EM's ability before hiring. The job just feels really subjective with infinite variations on how to approach it. So what you need is some other kind of je ne sais quoi to get people excited about you. Maybe you have a lot of mutual contacts that praise you highly. Maybe you come in as part of an acquisition and the acquiring company has a lot of respect for you. Stuff like that. Either way I don't think the ability to do the day-to-day work is a good enough to get hired (which sucks, but remember "grain of salt").
Tasks and differences from tech lead vary between companies. In general though an EM isn't writing as much code. Mostly focused on coordinating meetings, hiring, and making sure their team's projects are headed in the right direction. EMs also tend have a strong influence on the engineering culture (establishing and enforcing it). So for example an EM might push heavily for TDD and pair programming on their team while another EM might focus on other stuff like rapid prototyping.
Tech lead OTOH may also influence a decision on TDD/pairing from the previous example, but not exactly establish the guideline for the team to do it. Tech lead would choose the testing framework not the EM. OTOH EMs might have a strong influence over larger engineering decisions (like using K8s or not).
"Moving from a non-tech retail company sounds extremely boring to anyone interviewing you (no offense)."
This makes complete sense. If I were on the hiring side, I'd be skeptical as well. What's interesting to hear is that even in big tech companies with established hiring processes getting to know the right people matters.
"Either way I don't think the ability to do the day-to-day work is a good enough to get hired"
This makes a lot of sense. I'm reading it as "you are able to showcase some extraordinary quality or success in your previous work during the interview or through someone vouching for you" without which there's no compelling reason to hire you.
> What's interesting to hear is that even in big tech companies with established hiring processes getting to know the right people matters.
Even more so with big tech companies IMO. The same isn't true for IC work though.
It kinda makes sense too. An IC can demonstrate their ability to add value through a rigorous technical interview process. But an EM? Impossible to measure so you can only look to references and past work.
My personal take on this is it's very difficult to measure an EM's ability before hiring. The job just feels really subjective with infinite variations on how to approach it. So what you need is some other kind of je ne sais quoi to get people excited about you. Maybe you have a lot of mutual contacts that praise you highly. Maybe you come in as part of an acquisition and the acquiring company has a lot of respect for you. Stuff like that. Either way I don't think the ability to do the day-to-day work is a good enough to get hired (which sucks, but remember "grain of salt").
Tasks and differences from tech lead vary between companies. In general though an EM isn't writing as much code. Mostly focused on coordinating meetings, hiring, and making sure their team's projects are headed in the right direction. EMs also tend have a strong influence on the engineering culture (establishing and enforcing it). So for example an EM might push heavily for TDD and pair programming on their team while another EM might focus on other stuff like rapid prototyping.
Tech lead OTOH may also influence a decision on TDD/pairing from the previous example, but not exactly establish the guideline for the team to do it. Tech lead would choose the testing framework not the EM. OTOH EMs might have a strong influence over larger engineering decisions (like using K8s or not).