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Comment by burritofanatic | Hacker News Reader

As a side note, the author's bio is interesting. He went from assistant VP at Merrill Lynch to being a software engineer at Etsy.

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Assistant VP in a big bank usually means underpaid third-class software dev. Working as a software engineer at Etsy is most likely a promotion.

Yeah, if he'd gone from Managing Director to writing code for Etsy that would be interesting. Bank titles make tech company inflated titles look sedate. "You're a senior engineer your second year out of school? I'm an EVP, dude, why you so bad?"

Maybe job titles should somehow indicate the number of others in the company with the same job title. So VP/3500 would mean there are 3500 people with the title "VP" in the company. Not so impressive.

I remember once when my dad worked at IBM, he mentioned the president of IBM was only 5 "bosses" up from him. I was really impressed, until he told me that it's not that impressive, because 10,000 other people are also in the same position.

I think the point of calling people VP, executive etc is explicitly to not do that. It's meant to sound impressive. :)

Absolutely. A lot of sales-heavy companies have thousands of vice presidents, because if you're getting approached by a 'sales employee from XYZ investment bank' you hang up, if you get approached by 'the' (really 'a') vice president of sales from XYZ investment bank, you're more inclined to consider the sale.

There's entire industries where you start out of college around age 22, get an entry function for 3 years, a follow-up function for 3 years, and then become vice president by 30, and stay there for life, become a partner or change careers. The amount of VCs is ridiculous and totally lost its meaning.

Merrill Lynch isn't a bank, it's more like a trading house. AVP is a somewhat inflated title, but that usage typically means something like "experienced employee" or "team lead". That's the highest a lot of people reach, in fact.

AVP is something like the equivalent of senior software engineer rather than team lead. There are even plenty of MDs that are just individual contributors.

Titles in finance usually reflect pay band rather than any sort of management role.

Assistant TO the VP. :)

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