Job Titles Are Bullshit
jvt.me
jvt.me
On the one hand, this could be someone who is an unrestricted line officer and a qualified surface warfare officer. This is someone who could be the commanding officer of a destroyer.
On the other hand, this could be a dentist with 20 years of experience but no significant leadership responsibilities.
The quote I've heard in the context of the UK's Royal Navy is that the same rank can be commanding officer of a ship at sea or someone who makes tea for an admiral at Northwood.
There are reports that a company can buy which provide detailed analysis of how other companies in their industry (and geographical area) are paying their staff.
A big part of the process of deciding how much of a raise someone should get then comes down to that data: how does their current salary compare to the median pay for similar levels at other nearby companies?
Obviously the actual titles used within companies vary a lot, but the report gathering companies attempt to normalize those.
Even without these cross-company reports, the title you have within a company has a very strong influence on how salary is calculated in that it allows your salary to be compared with your peers within your own company.
Work backwards from that and call yourself whatever you want :)
You just can’t trust that somebody who was Staff Engineer at Yoyodyne has the skills you’d expect from a staff engineer. Sometimes because of title inflation, but also for other reasons—some people really do weasel and connive their way into promotions. We had an L6 (here, the level of a staff engineer) who was an absolute menace, and was great at telling lies to management. Every company has people like that, so you always have to vet new hires.
Signed, CTO of this HN comment
Calling everyone involved in software an "engineer" seems to be a very FAANG-y thing that has trickled to "lesser" companies.
I mean I've called myself a programmer since forever ago. I'm not comfortable with the term "engineer". I concede that it helps business types take me and what I do more seriously. "Programmer" connotes somebody who mindlessly translates human-language requirements into code, even though there's nothing mindless about that process. So I quietly accept the title of engineer when a company bestows it upon me. But I'm a programmer at heart. When I hear "engineer" I think of my father, who could design and build actual engines. Or maybe a civil engineer? I dunno.
"Software engineering" was a term coined by, I believe, NASA engineer and Apollo software lead, Margaret Hamilton. When she used the term, it was more in the sense of like, chemical engineering. A chemist experiments with, and attempts to synthesize, new chemicals to determine their properties. A chemical engineer is concerned with scale; they solve for how to produce chemicals at industrial scales. The chemist's technique may produce small amounts of a chemical for experimentation; the chemical engineer needs to design a way to produce the chemical by the kilolitre.
So originally, software engineering concerned itself with how to develop software at industrial scales with reliable, repeatable results. Of course much of it is nonsense because the purpose of programming is to develop something new. There's a lot of overlap between software engineering as a discipline and what we today call "methodology". But methodology is, largely, a cargo cult! Today, to be a software engineer is to be a cog in a system that follows some "best practice" (meaning you won't be fired for adopting it) process.
Which is better? To be a writer (like Hemingway or Dostoyevsky)? Or to be a "literature engineer" (say, one of the faceless ghostwriters who churn out Sweet Valley books under Francine Pascal's byline)?
These days, I just call myself a "developer". I think it's nicely neutral and gets me out of those awful "what is an engineer, anyway?" discussions.
There is a saying about banks "More VP's than coffee pots" and it's true. Stay at a bank long enough and they will slap the VP title on you.
My lack of "respect" for any ones title that didn't start with a C started there.
There are key people, the gate keepers, the knowledge havers in ever org. Those who know where the closet is with the skeletons (or in some cases grave yards)... These are the real Senior's in their respective roles. Be it engineering, CS, accounting... the old hands who in a pinch can do any job who understand their work, how it fits in with the business and can do all the jobs their role touches.
What this article is about: Its titles that come out of HR, pay grade, and role definition. Those folks (and more so at larger companies) take those things seriously. Startups throw titles out to either make people feel special or to make things seem more equal when they aren't... It keeps them engaged in what amounts to a shitty situation! Title bumps and free snacks for all is the startup way.
For example at my last company we had 9 principal engineers, but the responsibility matrix for described maybe a half dozen people in the entire language ecosystem.
My guess is that if you regularly have seniors telling you other comparable companies are paying 50% more for the same job, they probably actually are.
I've checked. Our expectations of a senior are a lot lower than the other company. Plus, if it was true, then I'd expect all my seniors to be leaving. The fact they're not indicates that our salaries aren't that bad.
My point is that the only way to really check is to talk to someone who’s done both jobs without a lot of data points.
Can you disclose the ranges you’re talking about?
I talk to people from the other company quite often when they apply for jobs at my company...
No one is going to tell you: “They say senior engineers are supposed to lead large scale cutting edge projects from beginning to end but really I’ve just been working on a login page for the past 3 months.”
Do you regularly hire the seniors you talk to as principals? Really a better question is do you hire juniors from that company who are ready to be promoted to senior there as principals at your company?
Companies are not going to pay people for just meeting the bar, but actually for doing the higher-level work, right?
If you're ready for the next level but can't find an opportunity inside your current firm (for whatever reason) then that can be a signal that you should be looking for another opportunity if you care about fulfilling that ambition.
how does one know this ?
Not everyone is cutout for staff but everyone is capable of making improvements beyond senior. But job titles explicitly discourage that by tying pay to job titles.
This is the only thing that matters. Skillsets and expectations differ from company to company. Who cares what they call you? What matters, to me, is how much you can extract. If you can't contribute, let another engineer (or group of engineers) make an argument for why you should be demoted or fired. They will have to contend with whoever hired you, which will include a manager and their record of hiring and other factors. It's not really worth it.
I was pretty fearless and was successful in getting people let go, a lot, when I was under 30. It helped that the biggest factor is politics and/or market conditions. I have also been let go because of similar reasons...eg I wrote a bad review of a manager and I didn't follow esoteric standards I didn't know about. Eventually, by the time I was 40, I had a good sense of how people could grow. Now I categorize people as useful to me or not, when I'm leading a team.
Either way, titles are bullshit. You will still be judged by them, within the context of your current employer.
Titles also matter when working in distributed teams, where a lot of the subtle signaling that happens in face-to-face situations is muted. I once pushed for a title change when I was going to lead people overseas, because it was very important that, if my team looked me up in the company directory, "on paper" I outranked them.
> I've worked with engineers who've been hired at a higher level than I believe they are due to negotiating their compensating package higher, which is frustrating too, as you can then expect more of them, when they don't necessarily have all the skills.
That's a real important factor, especially when playing "large company politics." In some cases, hiring quotas need to be met, and market conditions need to be met too.
But, when it comes to experienced employees who a company wants to hold on to, meeting their salary expectations needs to come in line with the title.
Your corporate title is your level on HR's ladder, and it'll be based on whatever HR comes up with - senior, VP, director, etc.
Then more often functional titles are determined by individual departments or groups, and reflect what someone is actually doing. This is architect, PM, lead, manager, whatever. Sometimes these could conflict with corp titles, but often end up being role specific.
It's all dependent on how companies set things up.
I mean, places like Microsoft have 10 or 12 levels; how can you actually distinguish engineers at that granularity? I've worked on teams where everyone is a staff engineer.
But what you do is normalize them for LinkedIn. That's what I do.
Isn’t this contradictory?
For e.g. “I quite like knowing where folks sit on the org chart compared to me”, & puzzling over the ‘meaning’ of “senior” in a job title!
They are especially useful when talking to external people. An email from “Joe Shmoe, engineer” lands very differently than an email from “Joe Shmoe, head of engineering”
I also think this feels like pandering to prejudice and might even make things worse by encouraging people not to take those people seriously unless they have the right title.
You also still do not need huge numbers of job titles to try and indicate an exact level, nor title inflation.
I am quite surprised that title inflation has not caused more problems than it has. Its been awhile but IIRC UK law (and other common law countries I would guess) will hold a company to a contract if the employee was made to look like they had the right to agree to it - and calling someone "director" might well do that.