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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I hit “staff engineer” about four years into my career, and kept it when switching jobs. Kinda ridiculous. I was even offered a director level job months later.

I’m good but I’m nowhere near that good. Title inflation is silly and ten years in, I’m done paying attention to them at all. They tell me nothing.

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And I hit "Senior" 4 years into my career, and have struggled to get a "Staff" title for the last 18 years. I would love some of this title inflation, but haven't been blessed by it. I think there's some amount of luck involved just choosing the correct jobs.

Most people who are capable of doing so have hit the skill cap for programming after 6-8 years. The biggest part of being a Staff engineer is correctly identifying and gravitating to the projects that are going to be important and successful.

It's still happening today. I just discussed a role with a recruiter hiring for the same kind of thing: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/3443314062/?refId=xpvVYRn...

(Staff) titling with a 4+ years of experience ask is incredibly confusing to me.

Its even weirder on the interview side. We had someone apply as a Principle who I could only describe as "solidly mid level"

I wasn't a jerk about it in the interview, but I said something to the effect of "I know titles are different at all other companies, but here the expectations for PEs is that they're tasked on the most critical technical initiatives and are held to high standards for execution. You're also going to be expected to mentor not just Junior technical staff, but also mid and senior level engineers. Does this sound like a role you're interested in? It's fairly demanding."

Guy didn't flinch and said "Yeah, that's exactly what I'm looking for!" :|

(We did not hire)

Why did you even bother asking a question like that instead of telling the candidate directly that the role you're hiring for is beyond their level/expertise/experience/etc?

From the candidate side, the only way to differentiate between "senior" "staff" "principle" "lead" or whatever between companies is the required years of experience on the job listing. Which is a terrible metric, but it's more informative than the title or job duties.

The way our interview guidelines work the interviewer is not permitted say such things to a candidate.I was also trying to stress, at our org at least, this wasn't a titled based on seniority but by responsibility. I had no say in setting the interview guidelines or defining the job role, I was simply the messenger.

Was he "solidly mid level" in terms of years-of-experience or ability? I find myself conflating the 2 frequently, and have to remind myself not to. I like to periodically remind myself that Zuckerbeg as a 22-year old was a successful founder-CEO for a business over a hundred employees and a $1B acquisition offer.

Sure, he is not the norm. But I'm sure there are plenty of people equally as talented as him who didn't take the entrepreneurship route and are now languishing in the corporate ladder. Any company can achieve wild success if they are able to identify such talents and place them immediately in high-impact roles.

As a candidate, I’d be curious about why I was being lectured about why I didn’t meet the “high standards of execution” of some dude who can’t spell “principal”.

It would be a matter of principle to point that out.

FWIW, at my non-tech company, our compensation is far far below tech compensation. HR is extremely resistant to increasing salaries for SWEs. It’s comparatively easy to argue that, if an individual has a competing offer for 300k they’re clearly very valuable and we should give them a title that fits that.

Essentially, it’s easier to make tons of exceptions than to fix the root cause.

You should have taken the director job, you probably would have handled it as well as anyone else. I was a "Director" of Test at one company. I didn't even have a budget. Even in interviews I'll tell folks that I was a test manager with a glorified title (though with no budget, was I even a "test manager"?).

I’ve learned after a number of years that I don’t want any job where there’s an expectation that I’m reachable after 5pm. That was definitely one of them.

I expect that, if given the title Director, the candidate has a P&L and makes a significant part of her income through making the P&L. Director should be "Manager of Managers" -- close to "Vice President"

I would say your expectations are reasonable. The anecdote was more to point out the some of the ridiculousness of title inflation (and now that I reread, I did a poor job of getting that point across). I was no where near director-level in job responsibility, nor did I really want an actual director job to begin with.

But now imagine I'm full of myself with my new "Director" title, and go out to interview for real director-level jobs. Man, the previous company would have done me no favors as I go out there and get absolutely slaughtered in interviews.

My last "staff+" job involved way too many meetings for my taste. If I wanted to be a professional meeting attender, I'd have chosen another line of work.

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