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On a related note, I dated a woman who was promoted to vice president of a small start up when she was in her 20's. She had to hide her title on her resume when
by robbyking 5y ago
On a related note, I dated a woman who was promoted to vice president of a small start up when she was in her 20's. She had to hide her title on her resume when she left because no established firm wanted to hire someone whom they assumed they'd need to pay a quarter million dollars to be competitive.
Sometimes grandiose titles can work against you.
- ska 5y ago> Sometimes grandiose titles can work against you. Early stage startups can be especially hilarious that way, especially when young founders/early stage employees mistakenly feel they need a "big" title to be taken seriously...
- derwiki 5y agoSometimes they do! My last company worked with title companies and it’s a little “insulting” to send less than a director to meet with them.
- zaphod12 5y agooh yeah, this is super true of sales. everyone in your sales org needs absurd titles or nobody will ever speak to them. Just one of those things apparently.
- danielvaughn 5y agoYep, indeed. I'm technically the CTO of the startup I'm helping to found. And even though I'm 37, I haven't been in tech long enough to feel like I've earned that title, so my LinkedIn says Chief Software Architect (I made it up).
- camhart 5y ago"It's interesting, these titles," Musk said. "You know that there's actually only three titles that actually mean anything for a corporation? It's president, secretary, and treasurer. And technically they can be the same person. And all these other titles are just basically made up. So CEO is a made-up title, CFO is a made-up title. General counsel, a made-up title. They don't mean anything." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXtjnNWUeAk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXtjnNWUeAk
- shard 5y agoI thought General Counsel means you have a JD?
- shadowfox 5y agoYou generally need that and typically reasonable experience wrangling different legal matters at scale. I guess Musk was just being Musk.
- sam_lowry_ 5y agoI think that Musk is technically right.
- Hermitian909 5y agoYou'd need to be licensed to perform the various legal duties one expects of general counsel, but general counsel is not a protected title and thus anyone within the company could be given the title. Musk is right on this one.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- smorgusofborg 5y agoI think this quote is actually about a different point. The President, Secretary and Treasurer don't need any actual credentials for their role like a council needs a JD, but they have specific responsibility/liability in corporate legal structures.
- HideousKojima 5y agoWhat Musk is saying is that from a legal perspective, there are only three job titles/roles that must be filled in a corporation. Beyond that, they could literally have titles like "Grand Chief Space Wizard" and "Cheesy Toast" for various jobs and roles. They could call the role of General Counsel "Asshole in a Suit."
- 5y ago
- radicalbyte 5y agoHow long have you been in tech? I'm 41 and have been in tech since I was 17 :) I've been calling myself an Architect but after working with some experienced CTOs.. lets say I now know my value/position. If I ever work for someone else then that's the minimum position I'd take.
- danielvaughn 5y agoI've got about 10 years of experience, I didn't discover my knack for programming until my late 20s, unfortunately.
- noodlenotes 5y agoThe funny thing is that I might assume a CEO/CTO at a small startup has less experience than a "Chief Software Architect." My assumption would be that the executives are founders and that there's not a minimum experience requirement for founders.
- danielvaughn 5y agoInteresting, hadn't thought of that. But wouldn't you assume the same of an architect at a small startup?
- rowanajmarshall 5y agoIf you take the stereotypical Silicon Valley style start of 2-4 founders in their 20s or early 30s, someone is gonna be CTO, and there's a good chance they'll have relatively little experience. But a Chief Architect, I'd assume was an experienced early hire rather than a founder.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoI was one of the technical guys on a Danish standardization project called OIO - Offentlig Information Online (offentlig means governmental in this case) - at one time they decided that we needed 'titles', so I and one other guy decided we would call ourselves XML Architects as a piss-take on another part of the project. Got the business cards and everything, but ADHD me lost mine.
- rsynnott 5y agoAlso, oddly, banks, where everyone seems to be a VP at the very least.
- LinuxBender 5y agoWhen I worked for a bank it was explained to me that early on foreign banks and financial institutions would not take a call from someone other than a VP, so they made all the bankers VP's to get work done. That was probably an over simplification.
- skatanski 5y agoIn banks in engineering it was once explained to me, that dev salaries require a title (in comparison with other staff). Hence ordinary developers are often titled AVP, VP or AD.
- ska 5y agoI think this is mostly a technical requirement related to signing authority (e.g. for lots of things you need to be an officer). Of course, the VP being the threshold target role for this is a choice, but it seems to be useful in contexts like banks to have some sort of dividing line.
- ceras 5y agoThing is, within the banking industry, these end up being fairly standardized titles. Titles mean less across industries, but within an industry, there's some consistency. In fact in banking, these are more standardized than tech industry titles are. Typically at banks, the ranks are: analyst, associate, VP, managing director. Everyone eventually gets to VP, so it's not a particularly high level. It's similar to how tech companies have a level everyone is supposed to reach (often "Senior"). So, analyst is an entry-level role, associate is a mid-level role (2yrs experience, or a higher degree), and VP is a terminal role. VP is a wide band, though, so there's often sub-levels within that (whether publicly visible or not): managing director is a very high title at a bank.
- madaxe_again 5y agoMy cofounder and I just used “Design Lead” and “Dev Lead” as our titles for nearly a decade - I only reluctantly took the mantle of “CTO” after taking outside investment, as they insisted on grandiosity - said it was amateurish to have small titles whilst employing 50+ people.
- pkaye 5y agoTitles are not standardized. Some companies a "member of technical staff" is a starting position and in others its the highest engineering position.
- yunyu 5y agoA quarter million dollars is what a typical new grad offer looks like nowadays
- corpdronejuly 5y agoIt's not typical. It is possible though.
- anamexis 5y agoWhere typical = atypical
- ska 5y ago> a typical new grad offer That's mare than stretching "typical"
- gambiting 5y agoI love how HN sometimes behaves as if the entire world is one or two small corners of the US.
- selestify 5y agoIf you graduate from any top 10 school in the US — which plenty of people do — it is indeed a pretty typical offer Love how I’m downvoted for pointing out a fact. I mean, for fuck’s sake, look at levels.fyi. And look at how many people FAANG and FAANG-adjacent startups hire every year. It’s really not that rare. But hey, stay in denial.
- marcellus23 5y ago> If you graduate from any top 10 school in the US — which plenty of people do Since when does "typical" mean "graduated from a top 10 school"? That's why you're being downvoted.
- selestify 5y agoBecause those schools collectively admit tens of thousands of students every year. It’s not that rare.
- a4isms 5y agoMy sole stint as a VP was in a thirteen-person startup. I had that title for pseudo-legal reasons, we needed a VP. My later role as Director of a 50-person engineering group in a 200-person startup was way more relevant in terms of my experience managing development.
- ButterWashed 5y agoHaving just taken a job as a l Lead SRE in a large consultancy despite not being skilled or experienced enough I'm terrified that I'll struggle to move to a new org solely because of my job title. It's jarring how much of an impact it has made on me and I don't really know what to do about it. I'm aware that it's only really a problem when I move but I don't think the work and tech I'll be exposed to will help me reach a level where I'll be confident.
- quacked 5y agoJust rephrase the job title on your resume so it's faithful to reality but not the literal title. At my last job, my formal title was "Systems Integration Engineer", which has a real industry definition as recognized by various engineering fellowships. Since I did very little formal Systems Integration at the job, I labelled myself as a "Cargo Logistics Engineer" on my resume. It worked fine.
- metacritic12 5y agoCould you just downgrade yourself without the company's consent? A upgrade seems fraudulent, but a downgrade...
- moron4hire 5y agoAt Apple, they do that for you when you leave!
- AdrianB1 5y agoYes, I never use my official title in the company emails. There were some funny moments in the past when some people thought someone reporting to me was my boss, but it was always funny. These days people in my team have more impressive titles than me, I am totally fine with that.
- commandlinefan 5y agoI've struggled with that, having been in the same position - I was a "VP" at a six-person startup over ten years ago. Of course, I didn't anything remotely VP-ish there - I was programming computers, same as I've ever done. But, that was my title. So... do I write that on my resume and be honest about my title or write a title that's honest about what I was actually doing?
- jghn 5y agoIMO it's always fine to be creative when listing a past job title, PROVIDED you are trying to provide more accurate information and not deceive. I've had titles that do not at all accurately reflect my day to day, so I list them as something more topical. However I will never portray myself as having more authority nor more day-to-day experience than my title would have otherwise conveyed.
- 908B64B197 5y ago> She had to hide her title on her resume when she left An easy fix for that would be to add the number of employees she managed and the size of the company. The title is scary but she did manage people and did report to the CEO, so to me it is a VP position. Of course, that won’t map 1:1 when hiring into a new company (doubt she’ll be reporting to the CEO) but the person she might report to would be managing an org of a similar size to her previous company. > because no established firm wanted to hire someone whom they assumed they'd need to pay a quarter million dollars to be competitive. 250k total comp (including some equity) doesn’t sound outlandish to me. Very much in the market for someone who had lead experience in her 20’s. Some fresh grads land that out of school.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago> had to hide her title on her resume when she left because no established firm wanted to hire someone whom they assumed they'd need to pay a quarter million dollars to be competitive That's bizarre given Wall Street has been abusing the Vice President title for generations now. (VPs at American banks report to Managing Directors, a middle-management level of which there are hundreds if not thousands. It's the tier above Associate, i.e. straight out of B school or with a year or two of Analyst experience.)
- TMWNN 5y agoThe European equivalent is "Executive Director". (That is, someone at Goldman who was promoted to VP from Associate in the US would have been promoted to ED in Europe.) That's even worse title abuse, if you ask me.
- valbaca 5y agoThis is hilarious because I recently had a junior dev come to me to discuss issues they were having with their (incompetent) software manager. She said "I don't understand why he doesn't understand the technical aspects. It must be me...I must be bad at communicating because [the manager] was a CTO at a startup!" I literally laughed out loud. Her communication skills were fantastic, but she was so new and naive to think that titles from a startup have literally any worth.
- ianbutler 5y agoDepends on the startup to be fair.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jollybean 5y agoWhile it might have been a young CTO at a small startup, the field of technology is vast, it's not the job of the CTO to understand all aspects of it. Similarly, when I started in Engineering, I didn't understand quite how much complexity existed in all the other areas of running a company, I've since learned much about them and have much more respect for CEO's who have to manage all of those issues.
- nsonha 5y agomore naive to even badmouth your manager in an interview. She could be in the right but that's a very risky move.
- valbaca 5y agoIt wasn't an interview. I never said that so not sure where you got that. It was in a 1:1 where she was specifically seeking out advice on how to deal with this manager
- reincarnate0x14 5y ago"CTO" in particular is almost a running gag in the consulting arena as nearly everyone over 40 seems to be a former CTO somewhere.
- srvmshr 5y agoAt my current startup, I recommended everyone to hold the title of Research Engineer. I was to be recruited as a Software architect / Principal tech lead, but I chose to keep this title too & suggested the same to my peer & immediate junior. Something good that I learned from Facebook Engineering flat organization structure. Keeping the hierarchy flatter helped more honest communication. There were lesser inhibitions to talk & express opinion. In any disagreement, experience seniority played the subtle hand to navigate discussion. Compensation matters, title shouldn't.
- disgruntledphd2 5y agoThis is so very important, as titles can often inhibit information flow. The only problem with this approach is that people look for other markers of "status" (like, for instance, the amount of time you've been with a company.
- sys_64738 5y agoThe is especially prevalent on Wall St where the major banks have VPs car Ming out of their ears. They’re the equivalent of senior managers elsewhere.