4 ms·
Titles are bogus and everybody wants to be a "senior" something so they claim to not be clueless. Director is a ten-a-penny title like in the Wall Street banks.
by sys_64738 1y ago
Titles are bogus and everybody wants to be a "senior" something so they claim to not be clueless. Director is a ten-a-penny title like in the Wall Street banks. There, every other person is a VP. It's a total joke.
- pavlov 1y agoAlso “Head of X” which often means the titleholder is practically the only person doing X at the company, and/or has no actual power.
- leoqa 1y agoUsually this is the “leads the function but we’re not going let them into the c-suite”. The head of engineering gets usurped by the outside cto hire and put out to pasture.
- devinprater 1y agoOh, that explains the Microsoft Chief Accessibility Officer. No power.
- kulahan 1y agoIsn’t Microsoft pretty great with accessibility?
- cjbgkagh 1y agoIt seems like a weird choice, I would expect that person to have quite a bit of power.
- devinprater 1y agoThey've been slipping, especially on Windows.
- rcruzeiro 1y agoAs a former Head of Mobile, I agree.
- citizenpaul 1y agoI worked at a bank some years ago me and a co-worker got curious about the whole VP thing and setup a script/query(harder than it sounds)to find the ratio of FTE VP to all other FTE ratio and it was something close to 10:1. After that we were like ok so VP is basically like what every other company calls a supervisor. We are not going to take crap from them anymore.
- chrisweekly 1y agoIt's not about authority, it's about old-school payscales, created in an era || at traditional / vertical / hierarchical banking corporations when/where it was inconceivable that an IC could merit significantly higher compensation than a manager (let alone a manager of managers). Hence the "bank title" aspect assigned to senior or principal engineers with market rates higher than generic middle managers. An AVP (Associate Vice President) might be a not particularly senior developer.
- citizenpaul 1y agoA lot of the "VP's" would try to throw their title "UH I"M A VP so get it done" around as some sort of weight when they wanted/needed something. Originally we were always like "OH Crap" a VP needs it so it must be important. After a while we noticed the quantity and did the whole research to that conclusion. It greatly reduced our stress/workload. Yeah I"m aware of the pay-to-title issues though that was secondary.
- sys_64738 1y agoOne of the perks of the Wall St banks VPs is that they got a desk such that their back was against the wall at the end of an open plan office row. Our VP was very proud of that nobody could look over his shoulder.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 1y agoThat does sound like a nice perk!
- 1y ago
- unyttigfjelltol 1y agoCould be worse. They could assign demeaning titles "Junior Assistant", "Compliance Associate",etc. I think title inflation is a charming sign of an organization trying show respect to its workers.
- giantg2 1y agoMore like appeasing their workers with worthless titles instead of money.
- somanyphotons 1y agoI can't wait to see a Vice President of Helm Charts
- swader999 1y agoI was a Petroleum Transfer Engineer when I was sixteen. Then everything went self serve. History repeats I fear.
- denimnerd42 1y agomy mothers first title was inexperienced assistant in her public accounting firm
- bigfatkitten 1y agoBanks making everyone a VP is a marketing gimmick. Customers like to think they’re talking to a senior manager about their home loan, rather than some worker bee. Makes them feel important.
- ponector 1y agoBut it is not related to customer feelings nowadays. A lead of a small team of engineers has director title.
- moomoo11 1y agoMaybe at an early stage startup. Nobody takes such people seriously unless that startup later has a successful exit. And by successful I mean a big exit. Like IPO or high 9 figure or bigger acquisition. Imagine working somewhere and then walking away with peanuts and calling yourself a “director”. Of what? You got played lmfao.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago>Banks making everyone a VP is a marketing gimmick. Didn't all the characters in American Psycho had the title VP on their business cards?
- potato3732842 1y agoIt's as much a response to regulatory stuff as it is a marketing and perception thing. All these banks over the years were faced with rules either from their insurers and/or government to the tune of "you must have a process to control X" and they say, "well, ugh, I guess only VPs can do that" and then as they grew and merged and were acquired by each other it pushed the VP title way down the org chart.