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Comment by wldlyinaccurate | Hacker News Reader

> Saying "we can only give you this much because your title is X and we don't have an open management position, but we really value you!" is a great way to lose your best people.

This resonates with me so much. I've left a few companies after having conversations which ended with my manager saying exactly this. In most cases they have ended up hiring somebody else at a salary higher than mine.

It really confuses me. I usually don't want to leave these companies because the work is good and finding a new job can be stressful. They usually don't want me to leave because I do good work and finding a replacement is costly. I don't understand why all this bureaucracy and nonsense about job titles has to get in the way of finding a middle ground.

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I don't want to sound like a new age hippy here, but if you were to think of emotional capital as something you have to expend when you make hard decisions, I think managers have to expend a lot more emotional capital on decisions like this then they would like. And if they have to do that, it distracts them from other things.

So, to avoid expending that emotional capital, they create abstract rules and entities that they can point to and say "aww shucks, I wish we could give you more money, but This Other Thing won't let me" (whether that be HR, or a pay scale, or other things). It's usually phrased in a way to say that it's about promoting fairness or organizational principles or something like that, and it is to a point, but I think it's just as much about avoiding the hard work of managing.

The problem is that at a certain point, these abstract entities (HR and "the rules") gain more power than the managers themselves, and now the organization is incapable of doing what it needs to do because the structure it has put into place is more suited to protecting the status quo than it is to making hard but rational decisions.

That is what you get when you isolate decision maker from consequences of his decisions. HR does not feel the pain of you leaving, so he does not care. However, he has trouble to find a new person for low salary, so he is forced to raise the offer.

HR may not see the loss of institutional knowledge of high worker turnover, but they do see a lot of the more monetary costs: with all that constant hiring of replacements going on, HR sure needs a bigger budget next year! We might be looking at an incentive problem, amongst others.

a couple decades back, when my dad was working for one of the big telecom companies, they invented a new job title specifically so they could promote him with the appropriate pay bump while also keeping him coding instead of managing. (They later hired/promoted others with the same title.)

I thought it was a great solution. If a dinosaur like a telecom company can do it, why can't others?

Yeah, this is a fairly common compromise, and even helps in the stupid cases where you can't give person A a job title higher than person B who will be mortified if they don't have the best sounding job title, but you still need to give person A a raise and a feeling of advancement (so glad I don't work at a place like this anymore). So you give them some variation on their current job title (it's not a promotion over you, person B!) and a raise, and call it a day.

It depends on how effectively bureaucratic the bureaucracy is. If all workers have to have a job title that's already in the database, and all job titles have an assigned salary, then you're out of luck.

This has been extremely fascinating reading about job titles. I'll never understand why people care about them.

You should care about them. They facilitate movement in between companies. If you're a "manager" at a major organization but are actually doing VP level work and are getting paid like a VP, it will be very difficult for you to convince another company that they should hire you as a VP. You'll also get lots of cold calls from recruiters about jobs that you are severely overqualified for.

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