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Comment by DVassallo | Hacker News Reader

You can exhibit leadership and all those things at a much lower job tile.

On a semi-related note: I really dislike job titles. They make people think in labels. The most powerful feature of a team of creators is their idiosyncrasies. The best way I found to build something as a team is to adapt the work to the strengths of the individuals. Job titles squash the peculiar strengths and differences into a label and make organizations treat people as fungible units of work. Too many organizations define the work first and then assign it to the individuals, rather than define the work based on the individuals.

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Indeed, an ideal scenario for actually getting work done is when everyone knows each others abilities, and they collectively divide responsibilities (including leadership responsibilities) as peers.

Others have pointed out various reasons for titles, including:

- communicating one's level of responsibility to those outside the organization

- determining pay bands

- something to put on one's resume

Just for these reasons alone I would still insist on having an appropriate job title. It may not help me get work done, but it still impacts my career.

However, the reason why I like the idea of technical career ladders in general, is that (when done well) they should tell me how I can succeed in an organization beyond just hard work. I want to know that, if I demonstrate some ambition and initiative, that I am doing so in a way that the company will appreciate my work and I will benefit from it.

Yes, employees do want job levels, so it's unlikely they'll go away. If I had employees, and they insisted on a job title, I'd give them one.

I personally don't see why the measure of success of an employee has to be dependent on career ladder ascension. Why do employees need a change in job title to learn if they're succeeding at a company? Can't they see the success themselves? Can't their boss just tell them?

I think there are benefits to formalizing expectations (and what it means to exceed them) but yes, you can communicate that just by having a conversation. In fact the conversation is essential, a formal career ladder is just a tool.

I would say that the times in my career that I have had the most success were the times that titles didn't matter at all: what mattered was that I was doing hard, essential work as part of a highly-aligned team that was solving problems that impacted the business.

But eliminating job titles won't make those kind of situations happen, and having job titles doesn't prevent it. I've been in an organization that tried to just eliminate title differentiation, and it didn't work very well.

Let me change focus for a bit, and instead I'll address what I think would be necessary to successfully create a flat organization. The only way to make people comfortable with eliminating job title as a status marker is if they possess other status markers that are as strong (or stronger) than a title.

At a minimum, I think you would need to:

1) pay top-of-market salaries

2) fire anyone who isn't an exceptional performer

From what I've heard, Netflix is a pretty flat company, and they (claim to) do both of those things. Obviously there is more to it than just that, and I wouldn't recommend cargo-culting them, but I think they serve as a useful example.

It seems to me these days that job titles are more an indicator of time-served rather than technical abilities in many organisations in addition to a method of retaining staff.

I recently observed a company move from 'everyone is the same title' to specific jnr, snr, distinguished engineer titles. The primary reasons for this was to create a framework for salaries and provide a defined track for 'progressing' as the organisation got bigger.

But if you think about it - it really comes down to a method of retaining staff and salary banding, I have yet to see any organisations where the titles of engineers defines their abilities, all engineers have the same say.

I work at a very large company with decades of complex systems. I find titles useful because they let me quickly identify experts on other teams who are good at communicating.

If I have a problem integrating with their service, I will get more useful answers from that team's "senior" or "principal" engineers than from an "engineer I" who just joined the company a year ago.

Higher titles are not given out lightly here, so they still have some usefulness. I have yet to meet a senior who is anything less than highly competent.

>I have yet to meet a senior who is anything less than highly competent.

Where is this mythical land? Are you hiring?

Sounds like Microsoft’s naming scheme. I also found seniors there to be highly competent - but it does vary by org.

Confirmation bias? Other companies may solve you use case better with context-specific titles, e.g. “directly responsible individual on X.”

Yeah, some projects have explicit technical leads, they are usually the best resource but are sometimes pretty busy.

What exactly do you mean by confirmation bias here? As in, the other people on the team are just as competent but I don't find out because I only ask the seniors? It's possible. I have had some relatively unhelpful interactions with junior engineers in the past.

Great point; this kind of codification is absolutely in service of HR-type requirements. It reminds me of the book Seeing Like a State; the entire premise is the way that various administrative forces elide or even erase complex on-the-ground details and nuance in order to make the subject more manageable in some way.

Not to say this is categorically bad or wrong, but it's useful to recognize its purpose. In my current role I have a position as a technical lead, with someone who formally outranks me on my team. In practice all it means is that I'm the one that management comes to for scheduling. :) We work together as equals on any given task. I don't think either of us would ever try to pull rank.

Really funny. I've been through this too. So much that I thought we'd worked together. I do not put much store on titles when I hire as a reason. You just have to reevaluate.

By the way, your Twitter handle in your profile doesn't exist.

Netflix gives every engineer the same title: Senior Software Engineer. That worked out beautifully: everyone focuses on getting things done and doing the right things. One's total package depends on how important this person is to her team and to the company, and of course Netflix makes sure the person gets paid more than the market can offer. If the person disagrees with the market price, Netflix encourages the person to seek external opportunities.

Can't find a better system for those who don't about titles.

Zappos tried getting rid of titles and hierarchy. I interviewed there, and it felt unworkable to me. Power structures exist whether you define them or not. To be fair, I only got to observe it for a day, quite some time ago. Would be curious if anyone knows how that's going for them.

Edit: Found a 2016 update. Sounds like it was controversial, with lots of people leaving, but also sounds like they are still doing it. http://money.com/money/4183246/holacracy-zappos/

> Job titles squash the peculiar strengths and differences into a label and make organizations treat people as fungible units of work.

I'd think having clear job titles and differentiation would have the opposite effect of treating people as fungible units of work. I'm sorta with you on job titles, but my experience is that they enable organizational clarity, and people tend to like to show this reflected on their resumes/CVs. I'm curious to hear more about your thoughts on this.

The fact that organizations rely on job titles to measure/understand their capabilities is the problem. Sure, it’s simpler to think in labels/titles, but the strength is in the individuals. Look at team sports as a counter example where the thinking is in terms of the individuals, not labels.

What size company do you work at? how many distinct product lines?

A sports team is 12-50 people, plus an immense supporting team, many with very specialized roles but all aligned towards a very well understood goal and pretty stratified options for success.

A company could be hundreds or thousands of people with very diverse or even conflicting goals, spread over countless geographies and sub-teams.

Should the technical lead know their team mates by individual traits? absolutely but the VP can't possibly maintain that cognitive load and needs titles & positions to guide there actions.

Your counter example basically says every team owner knows everything the coach or sub-team coordinator knows, which is not true.

I worked at Amazon for 8 years; just left last month. Although the company has ~50K engineers, teams were made up of 8-10 people and orgs generally of around 200 people. The size of the company didn’t matter. Amazon could function just fine without job levels, and IMO it would function better. The VP doesn’t need to know the individuals. They can let the org leaders to deal with those details.

How does one determine who is VP or org leader without either de facto job levels?

Those are different roles. I meant job levels when I said titles.

> Look at team sports as a counter example where the thinking is in terms of the individuals, not labels.

You still have your best players starting and a number on the bench. This is analogous to specific software teams (front-end, back-end, etc.).

Job titles/level are really nice at my company because they have a help provide a language and social acceptable way to talk about the scope of tasks someone can accomplish AND a way to talk about the scope of a task or project.

Yes it’s simpler. But that’s exactly to problem. It squashes all the things that makes individuals individual.

Job titles don't in any way stop me from understanding the uniqueness of individuals on my team. There are many paths to leveling up, and understanding why people are in the positions they are directly requires that individual context.

That's good. But what value do job levels (not roles) give you and the company?

There's a gamut of reasons, and it benefits all of managers, ICs, and the company. I like to point to Spotify's prose on building their engineering career ladder as a good example of why ladders can be important.

0. https://labs.spotify.com/2016/02/08/technical-career-path/

1. https://labs.spotify.com/2016/02/22/things-we-learned-creati...

I think it is some measure of the quality of an organization how easily they allow and even encourage employees of all titles to take on leadership. It becomes a business advantage when done well.

> They make people think in labels.

That's because people do think in labels. Mother, Father, brother, teacher, sister, uncle, boss, manager, CEO. More primitively, tribe member, tribe leader, enemy, scary cat thingy, dangerous crawling thingy. It's part of our evolution.

> then assign it to the individuals, rather than define the work based on the individuals.

I would imagine this is impractical trying to run or build a large org then because you need to be able to define the work you have to do first, then assign it, it doesn't work the other way around.

I worked 8 years at a large company. Saw many initiatives succeed and fail. The reason I attribute to most of the failures was the expectation that someone with an idea could just find 5 developers and do it exactly as they say.

That is bad leadership. You still need to craft roles and titles in a manner that allows ownership and autonomy.

At my large company that I have been with for 4 years, you are given a title. The title has a certain baseline level of expectations. If you want the next title, you start acting like it. Then you are given it. You are given freedom and autonomy on how to act like it. For example, an expectation of a senior is to mentor. You can mentor in hundreds of different ways: run a workshop, do one-on-ones, pair programming with a junior, have lunch with people, and so on. Seniors are expected to demonstrate technical prowess. The baseline is delivering results on your immediate team, but if you want the next level up, you can branch out and impact the wider organization: you can do this through refactoring a large portion of a legacy system, improving the performance of a current system, adding better test coverage to a project you are not on, contributing to open source, or having a talk accepted at a conference. Just one of many examples.

I think this way works the best from my experience with two other systems: the ones as you describe, and then the mythological flat org.

Yes, it's bad leadership. IMO, good leadership is seeing what the individuals in your team are good and interested in, and adapt the work to that. Your 2nd paragraph describes the problem I'm highlighting. If for whatever reason someone is not interested in (or good at) mentoring, why expect them to mentor? Expectation from a leader cause people to feel forced to do them. People don't want to let their leaders down, but if they can't or don't like doing what they're expected to, they won't do a good job -- or the job at all. This obviously only applies to creative/knowledge work. I suppose it's less important in task-based/mechanical work.

Our company has two titles, one internal that's used in the HR systems for salary etc.

The other is the external title, that's mostly used to communicate what you are good at in a compact way. My title, for example is "General Specialist" =)

But if you always apportion work according to strengths, how can anybody ever fix their weaknesses? There have to be other criteria too, right?

I should have said strengths and interest. Both important for creators to create. The second one builds the first one.

I like this characterization. I would tend to agree.

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