Title Inflation Emerges With A Vengence | Hacker News Reader

Title Inflation Emerges With A Vengence

feld.com

32 pointsDanielRibeiro14 comments

I’ve never paid much attention to titles.

Thank you. Please, can everyone start doing this? It cuts both ways. I have a friend who is one of the best people I've ever known. I also worked for this person for a long period of time in a previous life. You couldn't imagine a better boss. He was the guy who did everything to cut out the red-tape of a large organization so that his employees could focus their time. He was also great at honing an idea even when that idea wasn't something that he knew all of the details about (I was a C# developer, he was big into php, perl, linux, etc).

He thoroughly earned a Director title at that company. Titles weren't garbage over there. They were tied to bonus payout percentages and salary scale (which determined the maximum that a person could make, not a minimum, of course).

He's now unemployed due to circumstances beyond his control (yes, there's no such thing as "beyond his control", he could have been interviewing before the collapse that resulted in him losing his job, hindsight 20/20 I'm sure).

He'd take any job right now, manager or not and he's one of those rare folks who has the skills required of a both a hacker and a good manager. When he makes it past HR, it's usually because the shop doesn't have an HR department. When he gets the interview, there's always concern expressed about his willingness to handle a perceived downgrade. When they call his references (I'm one) it's in the top 5 questions asked of me. They don't understand that this guy would be as useful and work as hard as an assistant to the regional manager as he would as a Director.

Edit: fix some grammatical/emphasis problems.

It's a general trend in how we use language today.

These days we reach for words like genius, brilliant, incredible, amazing, and unreal for even the most average things. The meaning is gone. We've used up the language reserves.

Same for job titles when everyone's senior this or VP of that.

I would give more credit to the fact that there has been significant growth in what you might call "incredible", "awesome", etc. of late. Maybe the usage of those terms is appropriate given our circumstances in technology.

The issue with the titles is probably something else.

I was surprised to learn that someone was a "Vice President" at a rather large bank. Until I learned that every branch location (if I understood it correctly) had one or more "vice presidents" of something or other. I guess this would mean/imply some sort of executive authority at the level of the branch location.

These things seem to go in cycles. And to come, inevitably, with expensive consultants to tell us what is currently in vogue and that we should, regardless, be "minding that gap".

I work at a bank and have worked with several banks as part of my previous jobs. Banks often have a lot of Vice Presidents. The one I'm at has at least a dozen and it only has 400 employes. But it gets better: there are several levels of Vice President - Executive VP, Senior VP, First VP, VP, and Assistant VP. And that means we have dozens of people with "Vice President" somewhere in the title.

The reason I heard is that a small bank would have a few VPs, but would merge with a larger bank. As part of the merger, people kept their titles. This happened over and over, so large banks have lots of VPs. Not sure if that's true, but it sounds reasonable.

Of course, this might be as likely an explanation:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070206164512AA...

My brother worked at a bank in the financial services sector, and virtually everyone was Vice President or higher. The reason was simple. They were interacting with CEOs, and many CEOs would refuse to talk to anyone who was not vice president or higher.

One explanation I've heard is that a VP at a bank would handle as much money as in the budget of a VP at a normal company. But of course, it's just crazy these days.

Now time for a story, in the '90s the company I was working for IPO'd and we all had shares, not enough to get rich, but enough to be a nice bonus. I called Salomon Bros to exercise and a VP answered the phone... So even receptionists get the the title!

> receptionist

Whereupon, you knew you were communicating with someone who had real authority (interpolating from my own experience with corporate secretaries (the working kind, not the officer kind). ;-)

Banks have ranks, for most employees, rather than job titles. For example, when I was there UBS had: non-officers, Associate Directors, Directors, Executive Directors and Managing Directors, in increasing rank.

Other banks do the same with other keywords instead of "Director". VP for example. Or whatever. The point is, it's just a rank scale that's meant to cover all the "officers" and provide them with sufficient apparent title that clients won't feel like the person they're dealing with is some junior guy.

Head of Title Inflation

I don't care what my title is, just compensate my fair market worth. Granting a title increase is just another cheap and easy way to keep wages down. "But, you just got promoted, we can't jump your pay much further or you'd be paid more than your title." Have heard this excuse more than once.

Since when does title confer ability? If my goal is to save/make the company money and I'm accomplishing those goals, why not just pay me what I'm worth and at the end of each pay period we call it even?

Titles are a lot like uniforms. To cite Richard Feynman:

"One of the things that my father taught me besides physics - whether it's correct or not - was a disrespect for respectable... for certain kinds of things. For example, when I was a little boy, and a rotogravure - that's printed pictures in newspapers - first came out in the New York Times, he used to sit me again on his knee and he'd open a picture, and there was a picture of the Pope and everybody bowing in front of him.

And he'd say, "Now look at these humans. Here is one human standing here, and all these others are bowing. Now what is the difference? This one is the Pope" - he hated teh Pope anyway - and he'd say, "the difference is epaulettes" - of course not in the case of the Pope, but if he was a general - it was always the uniform, the position, "but this man has the same human problems, he eats dinner like anybody else, he goes to the bathroom, he has the same kind of problems as everybody, he's a human being.

Why are they all bowing to him? Only because of his name and his position, because of his uniform, not because of something special he did, or his honour, or something like that." He, by the way, was in the uniform business, so he knew what the difference was between the man with the uniform off and the uniform on: it's the same man for him."

I foresee a backlash wherein people start putting things like "security" under their names.

I know of a few companies where it's hard to find someone below the level of director, dozens of AVP/VP/SVPs, and at least 10 C-level execs. I think it's a way of attracting people without having to pay them more. This seems like a societal effect of over-credentialization.

There are also enterprise sales organizations where all members of the team are given director or better titles because that has a real impact on whether or not they can meet with the CTO/CIO-level potential buyers.

Perfect example of how non-costly signals become worthless. Somehow it reminds me of how everyone is reluctant to accept check #1001 from a new account, so now banks just ask where you'd like the numbers to start.

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