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Having been at several companies, I think I was happiest about my career when I didn’t have a fancy title and did not really know anyone else’s either (aside fr

Having been at several companies, I think I was happiest about my career when I didn’t have a fancy title and did not really know anyone else’s either (aside from obvious managers). It was nicer just knowing who’s in charge of what thing, and seeing your influence grow as you are trusted with more things. When I see titles, it just makes unhelpful thoughts enter my head, like: are all these people “at my level” really contributing as much as me? Sometimes I even thought the reverse, like: how can this seemingly-junior person still be stuck at that level, when he is clearly doing all this great stuff we depend on every day? Of course the especially soul-crushing case is when you encounter people that clearly suck at what they do, and they’re 1-2 levels above you; and worse, I have occasionally seen those people promoted further! It is also hard not to look at titles on places like LinkedIn. I know I shouldn’t care, since titles mean different things at every company, and some especially-impressive-sounding titles can range from “meh” to “god-level” depending on where it is. And yet, it gets in my head sometimes, making me wonder every few years if I am at the level I should be. When the title “matters” at a company, it also makes me consider it a factor in annual reviews. If I get a raise, bonus, etc. but see my damned title stagnate year over year, suddenly I care about this and take it as a complete lack of recognition by the company (that literally would not happen if they simply did not tell me what my title is!).

pradn 5y ago
You hit the nail on the head. It was very different coming from Microsoft, where people's title and level (about one-two levels corresponded to a particular title) were visible in every chat dialog, to Google where you can edit your title to anything you want and levels can be seen only by going to a tool and looking it up specifically.
- ghaff 5y ago
  At my current company, where I've been for over ten years, I've always just made up a title to match my current focus/what seemed "fresh." My original external title that was made up to hire me didn't actually make a lot of sense and differed from the internal HR title anyway. Ended up doing something similar in my original tech job as well. I'm not sure I've ever really used my official HR title and would probably have to look it up to be sure I'm remembering it correctly.
- zhengyi13 5y ago
  I've personally set my title to "Shennanigans Regularly Effected". Also, lots of folk deliberately opt out of level visibility, too.
  - pradn 5y ago
    I didn't know you could opt out of level visibility!
- kelnos 5y ago
  When I started at Twilio, I set my title on whatever chat we were using to something silly like "Director of Naptime Initiatives". (Well, ok, when I started we just had a poorly-used internal IRC server, so I guess this was a bit later when we got HipChat or whatever.) Sadly, these days the title field on Slack is synced with Active Directory, which has the human-readable title name, plus the level number. It's really dehumanizing. I think I'd rather not know people's titles, just what team they're on, and their role.
xmprt 5y ago
On the flip side, having a title is a good way to know if you're being compensated appropriately. If you see someone 2 levels above you working on much less impactful projects then perhaps it's time to have a conversation with your manager about pay or time to start looking for new jobs.
- kstrauser 5y ago
  On a side note, I use to see people with higher titles than mine not visibly doing as much as me, and found it grating. Now I have one of those titles, and I'm working harder than before, but a lot of it is with vendors, contractors, and overseeing projects. To ICs inside a particular project, it probably likes like I'm not doing much of anything. It changed my outlook on such things a lot.
  - eadmund 5y ago
    I have found the same thing over the years. A lot of times the folks who 'just don't do anything' and 'just don't understand' were doing plenty and understood plenty, I just was too immature to get that at the time. Not 100% always, mind you, but way more often than not.
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Why do you feel you should be paid more because you feel you are doing more work? You are paid the least amount possible to fill your position during the hiring cycle. Your worth is what the market will pay you. The fact that someone else is doing more or less with a higher title shouldn't influence your life at all. Jealousy shouldn't tell you when you should look for a job. If you are unhappy leave if you are happy stay. If your happiness is determined by what a random person is paid you will never be happy.
  - joconde 5y ago
    That sounds weird. Are you saying that doing more work than better-paid employees shouldn’t be an argument during salary negotiations?
soheil 5y ago
> when you encounter people that clearly suck at what they do, and they’re 1-2 levels above you I think this is a logical contradiction. If there exists people that you are in a position to judge their competence you deserve to be in their position or higher, therefore it cannot be that they are 1-2 levels higher than you.
- burnished 5y ago
  Do people get what they deserve? It seems unclear. Therefor, no logical contradiction. Logic is a great tool by the way, but unless you are applying it formally you might be better off not trying to invoke it casually.
trgn 5y ago
That's all true, and yet, and yet. > and seeing your influence grow as you are trusted with more things. That's the ideal scenario, that you earn the esteem and trust of your peers because the work you do speaks for itself. The flipside with this is, this process takes time. It really takes years. Sometimes there will not be that time. You are a new hire brought in to do a high-impact thing; or a high-impact project crosses across the entire organization where suddenly all participants are relative stranger; or the team you worked in was of very low external visibility but a mentor recognized your potential and pulled you out to help recalibrate a different but malfunctioning team, etc... Then titles are important. It is very unfortunate that we are very cynical of titles, because, in well-run organizations, they are meaningful, and in fact, should be meaningful. Imagine in the military if every officer had to prove themselves over and over again. It's unworkable. At some point, larger organizations will need to grant leverage to a technical individual. A title helps with providing that.
- vasco 5y ago
  I agree and go further to say I've seen people with demonstrated contributions suddenly clearly being more valued when they get a title, to the point that nothing changes about what they do but others rate the impact as being larger after a promotion, to the point that they eventually are actually having larger impact just because others now believe they can / should. I've also seen the opposite, perfectly fine engineers get worse after a promotion due to the weight of the title, without any other change to their work / schedule.
HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
I hadn't thought about it in this context before, but I used to train Kendo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kendo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kendo), a Japanese martial art, a long time ago. One interesting thing is that Kendo doesn't have belts like most other martial arts, the principle being that seeing the color of someone's belt causes you to prejudge their ability. Ideally, you should only know how good they are by actually training/fighting with them. I've been very disappointed by comparing people's titles with their actual technical ability -- somehow it never seems to be the case that the ability outstrips the title.
- skeeter2020 5y ago
  >> somehow it never seems to be the case that the ability outstrips the title. Really? You've never worked with a junior who's punching far above their weight? I've had several on my team and work as hard as I can to get them promoted asap.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
    OK, perhaps I should have said "rarely." I've had direct reports who were like that and happily gave them the max rating on Performance Reviews and recommended promotions. That said, it definitely gets rarer the higher up you go.
    - tehjoker 5y ago
      Peter principle
- lr1970 5y ago
  > somehow it never seems to be the case that the ability outstrips the title. People get promoted until they reach their level of incompetence :-)
- mfrw 5y ago
  > Kendo doesn't have belts like most other martial arts, the principle being that seeing the color of someone's belt causes you to prejudge their ability. TIL: This is a really interesting perspective; Thank You for this! I will use it from now to calm myself down. I, always either got mortified by the extreme skill of my juniors or by the incompetence of seniors — not sure if it’s the case with me or is it a general feeling. The Kendo way at-least makes me ignore the titles :)
CodeMage 5y ago
I'm waiting to find a place that won't push me to keep advancing up the career ladder, without leaving my salary lagging behind the rising cost of living. Does having limited ambition make you a bad dev/engineer, if you keep learning new things and contributing quality code at your current level of responsibility?
- LargeWu 5y ago
  It doesn't make you a bad engineer, but it does, generally, put a ceiling on the value you are able to provide to the company. Individual contributors can only get so much done in a given amount of time, and over a long enough time scale, are generally interchangeable with one another. Sure, you might have some specialized knowledge or understand system X better than anybody else, but there's diminishing returns on that, hence why you won't get big raises forever. As you move up the chain, it eventually stops being about your direct technical contributions and about your ability to multiply the value of everybody under you in your org.
  - akiselev 5y ago
    > it eventually stops being about your direct technical contributions and about your ability to multiply the value of everybody under you in your org. I thought that was the whole point of the IC track: putting a technical person into a role where they can be a multiplier without burdening them with management responsibilities. Every staff/principle/architect IC I've ever worked with has had that kind of positive effect on the teams around them. Their schedules were indistinguishable from most managers, except they met mostly one on one and they could get a senior engineer's worth of work (impact wise) done in between the meetings instead of paying the management overhead.
    - LargeWu 5y ago
      Parent was explicitly stating they didn't want to climb the career ladder. i.e. They wanted to remain at a Sr Engineer level perpetually, but also not have their salary stagnate. I don't disagree that principle engineers can and should have a big multiplying effect, but I also wouldn't consider them strictly IC's either, even if they don't have people managing duties.
berto4 5y ago
i feel like a lot of folks don't care for the title as much as the monetary incentives and perceived "power" that comes with it.
banner2018 5y ago
Don't get carried away by marketing of thoughts, few folks prefer to be the mouthpiece of some grandiose concept .. if crazy ideas have followers, it becomes a cult...a cult over to.e becomes religion. There might be some honesty / truth behind what is described but in my 2 decades of IT work, mostly ass kissers have taken home the big bucks .

pradn 5y ago

You hit the nail on the head. It was very different coming from Microsoft, where people's title and level (about one-two levels corresponded to a particular title) were visible in every chat dialog, to Google where you can edit your title to anything you want and levels can be seen only by going to a tool and looking it up specifically.

ghaff 5y ago
At my current company, where I've been for over ten years, I've always just made up a title to match my current focus/what seemed "fresh." My original external title that was made up to hire me didn't actually make a lot of sense and differed from the internal HR title anyway. Ended up doing something similar in my original tech job as well. I'm not sure I've ever really used my official HR title and would probably have to look it up to be sure I'm remembering it correctly.
zhengyi13 5y ago
I've personally set my title to "Shennanigans Regularly Effected". Also, lots of folk deliberately opt out of level visibility, too.
- pradn 5y ago
  I didn't know you could opt out of level visibility!
kelnos 5y ago
When I started at Twilio, I set my title on whatever chat we were using to something silly like "Director of Naptime Initiatives". (Well, ok, when I started we just had a poorly-used internal IRC server, so I guess this was a bit later when we got HipChat or whatever.) Sadly, these days the title field on Slack is synced with Active Directory, which has the human-readable title name, plus the level number. It's really dehumanizing. I think I'd rather not know people's titles, just what team they're on, and their role.

xmprt 5y ago

On the flip side, having a title is a good way to know if you're being compensated appropriately. If you see someone 2 levels above you working on much less impactful projects then perhaps it's time to have a conversation with your manager about pay or time to start looking for new jobs.

kstrauser 5y ago
On a side note, I use to see people with higher titles than mine not visibly doing as much as me, and found it grating. Now I have one of those titles, and I'm working harder than before, but a lot of it is with vendors, contractors, and overseeing projects. To ICs inside a particular project, it probably likes like I'm not doing much of anything. It changed my outlook on such things a lot.
- eadmund 5y ago
  I have found the same thing over the years. A lot of times the folks who 'just don't do anything' and 'just don't understand' were doing plenty and understood plenty, I just was too immature to get that at the time. Not 100% always, mind you, but way more often than not.
ipaddr 5y ago
Why do you feel you should be paid more because you feel you are doing more work? You are paid the least amount possible to fill your position during the hiring cycle. Your worth is what the market will pay you. The fact that someone else is doing more or less with a higher title shouldn't influence your life at all. Jealousy shouldn't tell you when you should look for a job. If you are unhappy leave if you are happy stay. If your happiness is determined by what a random person is paid you will never be happy.
- joconde 5y ago
  That sounds weird. Are you saying that doing more work than better-paid employees shouldn’t be an argument during salary negotiations?

soheil 5y ago

> when you encounter people that clearly suck at what they do, and they’re 1-2 levels above you I think this is a logical contradiction. If there exists people that you are in a position to judge their competence you deserve to be in their position or higher, therefore it cannot be that they are 1-2 levels higher than you.

burnished 5y ago
Do people get what they deserve? It seems unclear. Therefor, no logical contradiction. Logic is a great tool by the way, but unless you are applying it formally you might be better off not trying to invoke it casually.

trgn 5y ago

That's all true, and yet, and yet. > and seeing your influence grow as you are trusted with more things. That's the ideal scenario, that you earn the esteem and trust of your peers because the work you do speaks for itself. The flipside with this is, this process takes time. It really takes years. Sometimes there will not be that time. You are a new hire brought in to do a high-impact thing; or a high-impact project crosses across the entire organization where suddenly all participants are relative stranger; or the team you worked in was of very low external visibility but a mentor recognized your potential and pulled you out to help recalibrate a different but malfunctioning team, etc... Then titles are important. It is very unfortunate that we are very cynical of titles, because, in well-run organizations, they are meaningful, and in fact, should be meaningful. Imagine in the military if every officer had to prove themselves over and over again. It's unworkable. At some point, larger organizations will need to grant leverage to a technical individual. A title helps with providing that.

vasco 5y ago
I agree and go further to say I've seen people with demonstrated contributions suddenly clearly being more valued when they get a title, to the point that nothing changes about what they do but others rate the impact as being larger after a promotion, to the point that they eventually are actually having larger impact just because others now believe they can / should. I've also seen the opposite, perfectly fine engineers get worse after a promotion due to the weight of the title, without any other change to their work / schedule.

HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago

I hadn't thought about it in this context before, but I used to train Kendo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kendo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kendo), a Japanese martial art, a long time ago. One interesting thing is that Kendo doesn't have belts like most other martial arts, the principle being that seeing the color of someone's belt causes you to prejudge their ability. Ideally, you should only know how good they are by actually training/fighting with them. I've been very disappointed by comparing people's titles with their actual technical ability -- somehow it never seems to be the case that the ability outstrips the title.

skeeter2020 5y ago
>> somehow it never seems to be the case that the ability outstrips the title. Really? You've never worked with a junior who's punching far above their weight? I've had several on my team and work as hard as I can to get them promoted asap.
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
  OK, perhaps I should have said "rarely." I've had direct reports who were like that and happily gave them the max rating on Performance Reviews and recommended promotions. That said, it definitely gets rarer the higher up you go.
  - tehjoker 5y ago
    Peter principle
lr1970 5y ago
> somehow it never seems to be the case that the ability outstrips the title. People get promoted until they reach their level of incompetence :-)
mfrw 5y ago
> Kendo doesn't have belts like most other martial arts, the principle being that seeing the color of someone's belt causes you to prejudge their ability. TIL: This is a really interesting perspective; Thank You for this! I will use it from now to calm myself down. I, always either got mortified by the extreme skill of my juniors or by the incompetence of seniors — not sure if it’s the case with me or is it a general feeling. The Kendo way at-least makes me ignore the titles :)

CodeMage 5y ago

I'm waiting to find a place that won't push me to keep advancing up the career ladder, without leaving my salary lagging behind the rising cost of living. Does having limited ambition make you a bad dev/engineer, if you keep learning new things and contributing quality code at your current level of responsibility?

LargeWu 5y ago
It doesn't make you a bad engineer, but it does, generally, put a ceiling on the value you are able to provide to the company. Individual contributors can only get so much done in a given amount of time, and over a long enough time scale, are generally interchangeable with one another. Sure, you might have some specialized knowledge or understand system X better than anybody else, but there's diminishing returns on that, hence why you won't get big raises forever. As you move up the chain, it eventually stops being about your direct technical contributions and about your ability to multiply the value of everybody under you in your org.
- akiselev 5y ago
  > it eventually stops being about your direct technical contributions and about your ability to multiply the value of everybody under you in your org. I thought that was the whole point of the IC track: putting a technical person into a role where they can be a multiplier without burdening them with management responsibilities. Every staff/principle/architect IC I've ever worked with has had that kind of positive effect on the teams around them. Their schedules were indistinguishable from most managers, except they met mostly one on one and they could get a senior engineer's worth of work (impact wise) done in between the meetings instead of paying the management overhead.
  - LargeWu 5y ago
    Parent was explicitly stating they didn't want to climb the career ladder. i.e. They wanted to remain at a Sr Engineer level perpetually, but also not have their salary stagnate. I don't disagree that principle engineers can and should have a big multiplying effect, but I also wouldn't consider them strictly IC's either, even if they don't have people managing duties.

berto4 5y ago

i feel like a lot of folks don't care for the title as much as the monetary incentives and perceived "power" that comes with it.

banner2018 5y ago

Don't get carried away by marketing of thoughts, few folks prefer to be the mouthpiece of some grandiose concept .. if crazy ideas have followers, it becomes a cult...a cult over to.e becomes religion. There might be some honesty / truth behind what is described but in my 2 decades of IT work, mostly ass kissers have taken home the big bucks .