4 ms·

At 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 ph

by dkarl 5y ago

At 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 ago
I 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 ago
I'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 ago
  Well, 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 ago
  I 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 ago
I always thought it originated in vmware but maybe they are copycats too. There are lot of these places around the valley big and small

by dkarl 5y ago

micro_cam 5y ago

I 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 ago

I'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 ago
Well, 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 ago
I 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 ago

I always thought it originated in vmware but maybe they are copycats too. There are lot of these places around the valley big and small