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> Sometimes grandiose titles can work against you. Early stage startups can be especially hilarious that way, especially when young founders/early stage employ
by 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."
- inawarminister 5y ago
- danielvaughn 5y agoLove it. Yeah I find myself mentoring junior engineers, writing code myself, reading documentation on tech I've never worked with before, designing email templates, writing marketing copy, crafting business plans, calculating sweat equity, etc etc. So at the end of the day...tf do titles mean
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 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.