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As someone whose first job title was "Assistant Director of IT," and who did nothing but write really bad PHP for a couple hours every day, this tracks with my
by pc86 5y ago
As someone whose first job title was "Assistant Director of IT," and who did nothing but write really bad PHP for a couple hours every day, this tracks with my experience. It also made interviewing harder because if you get a resume from someone with one job they've had for two years, and that job is Assistant Director, you're probably - rightfully - trashing that resume. I eventually learned to just change the title but then explain on first contact that my actual title was different, it just didn't bear any relation to what I was actually doing.
- PragmaticPulp 5y agoI had the inverse experience: I worked for a startup that gave literally everyone in the engineering department the same title of “Senior Software Engineer” in the HR system because they had one boilerplate offer letter used for everyone. I was a manager-of-managers, but officially I was a “senior software engineer”. Burned me badly on a couple reference checks, until I specifically started explaining the situation during interviews.
- dkarl 5y agoAt one of my jobs, all the developers were given the title "Member of Technical Staff" because our boss had worked at a particle accelerator (he had a PhD in physics) and that's what the scientists running experiments had on their badges. He did it for morale, and it probably did make us feel a bit fancier while we were writing Grails and GWT code.
- micro_cam 5y agoI think this is pretty common at early stage YC companies. At least the one I started at did this until they needed to give us fancy titles to impress investors.
- neilv 5y agoI've always thought of "Member of Technical Staff" as a Bell Labs thing. I almost did it at my last startup, to signal the egalitarian, cooperative engineering culture that I intended. One of the concerns was that it could hurt people's career mobility out (and willingness to join, since the startup was unlikely to be the engineer's home for the next few decades until retirement). I think it works easily when your organization is known as one of the places to go, everyone knows that they do titles that way, and that anyone there is worth considering as a hire. (But not when recruiters filter their resume keyword searches for senior, staff, or principal.) I don't know why Google didn't do it, way back when, since they did a few other culture things. I suppose that might've set a different tone for our industry today. (Though what seemed at the time to be low-loyalty culture coming out of California was already in force when Google started, most conspicuously in what I called "IPO-hopping", and maybe Google just had to work within that, at the time.)
- pradn 5y agoWell, every dev is listed as "Software Engineer" unless they change it specifically. Maybe you're forced to change it if you're a manager, but I'm unsure of that. So you never exactly know the level of the person you're talking to unless you work with them a lot or go out of your way to look it up.
- ghaff 5y agoI think it's sort of a labs (whether national labs or more broadly) thing. I have a good friend who works for one of the national labs subcontractors and they use the technical staff terminology.
- dilyevsky 5y agoI always thought it originated in vmware but maybe they are copycats too. There are lot of these places around the valley big and small
- nowherebeen 5y agoYup. And I always am weary of any manager at a startup. They think just because they were a manager at a startup, it means they can be a manager at a much larger company. How many people did you manage? (some of them managed 1 person) What did you actually manage? (can't explain other than order people around) Don't assume the title means they know how to actually do the job at your company. Titles tend to be severely inflated at small startups.
- commandlinefan 5y agoI had a job as a VP a few years back… at a six-person startup. I cringe when I list that job on my resume - do I lie and list the title accurately (I was a programmer with a massively inflated title) or report what my actual given title was and risk being seen as misleading?