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 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.