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This sounds more like entitled whining from a management PoV than anything constructive. Let me just take one shot, and then I'll go away. In this case, after

This sounds more like entitled whining from a management PoV than anything constructive. Let me just take one shot, and then I'll go away. In this case, after hours of discussions, I couldn’t shake this engineer’s fixation with understanding how his title would affect his ability to have impact at Delphix. After deciding that it was not a good cultural fit... Something I've learned the hard way is that people are insecure. I don't mean that they're always emotionally insecure (but that can be a part of it) so much as they're also positionally insecure. People care about titles because... (wait for it) titles matter. A title is a starting point. It's a formal statement of trust in a person. If my competence is a 7.3 and yours is a 7.6, people are going to listen to the person with the higher title, whether that's you or me. In fact, there are many organizations (even Google) where decisions are made primarily on title and formal job description, and that doesn't mean that they're bad organizations. It just means that they're big. Chain of command is a reality of life. Not a pretty one, but it's what your up against, and I have no problem with someone wanting to know where he's going to stand before he risks his career by stepping into a new company.

le_architect 12y ago
completely agree. It's more like Spock calling humans weak, stupid and illogical and not realizing that spock would have created windows and humans would create apple. I've worked with the people sited in the original blog. Early on in this engineering department there were no titles. It was like a pack of dogs with no alpha dog. Wonder if you have ever seen that. All the dogs are yapping and nipping because no one knows who is the alpha dog. Later they enforced a full hierarchy. CTO, VP, 5 levels of engineers. After the imposition of titles things ran smoothly and quietly. Everyone fell in line. No more yapping or nipping (for better or worse - there was a lot of fear and lost lines of communication, lost design ideas from engineers who were too afraid to voice their insights) The original lack of titles IMO came from the fact that the main engineers (ie senior, ie architects) , coming from Sun DTrace and Fishworks, had felt that stupid execs at Sun and stupid product managers told them, the gods of engineering, what to do and those people were stupidly wrong and they were always right. Now that they were out of Sun and in control of a brand new engineering team they were hell bent on keeping control since they were clearly the smartest beings around. They as the gods of coding should be the only product managers. They as the gods of coding should be the only architects. Yes, titles make a difference for better or worse. Worse when they are not deserved and better when they point out that the senior person has more proven experience. When super smart junior engineer says you should use Mongo for your Bitcoin banking site and the senior engineer with 20 years of experience says you should use an ACID compliant database, you should use your senior engineers advice. Super smart junior people can often talk dangerously misguided intelligent circles around more senior calmer senior engineers. Titles can, in the best of cases, help direct the discussion. Just ask http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/04/06/another-one-bites-the-dust-flexcoin/ http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/04/06/another-one-bites-t...
- bcantrill 12y ago
  I came from Sun Fishworks as well, and still have an engineering team without titles (everyone is a "Software Engineer"). This is deliberate[1], and I don't think it's been an impediment -- there is certainly not a problem with "yapping and nipping." Of course, every organization is different, and what works for one group of people may not work for another -- but I can't personally imagine working in an organization that insisted on hierarchical titles among its engineers. [1] http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/surge2013 http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/surge2013

le_architect 12y ago

completely agree. It's more like Spock calling humans weak, stupid and illogical and not realizing that spock would have created windows and humans would create apple. I've worked with the people sited in the original blog. Early on in this engineering department there were no titles. It was like a pack of dogs with no alpha dog. Wonder if you have ever seen that. All the dogs are yapping and nipping because no one knows who is the alpha dog. Later they enforced a full hierarchy. CTO, VP, 5 levels of engineers. After the imposition of titles things ran smoothly and quietly. Everyone fell in line. No more yapping or nipping (for better or worse - there was a lot of fear and lost lines of communication, lost design ideas from engineers who were too afraid to voice their insights) The original lack of titles IMO came from the fact that the main engineers (ie senior, ie architects) , coming from Sun DTrace and Fishworks, had felt that stupid execs at Sun and stupid product managers told them, the gods of engineering, what to do and those people were stupidly wrong and they were always right. Now that they were out of Sun and in control of a brand new engineering team they were hell bent on keeping control since they were clearly the smartest beings around. They as the gods of coding should be the only product managers. They as the gods of coding should be the only architects. Yes, titles make a difference for better or worse. Worse when they are not deserved and better when they point out that the senior person has more proven experience. When super smart junior engineer says you should use Mongo for your Bitcoin banking site and the senior engineer with 20 years of experience says you should use an ACID compliant database, you should use your senior engineers advice. Super smart junior people can often talk dangerously misguided intelligent circles around more senior calmer senior engineers. Titles can, in the best of cases, help direct the discussion. Just ask http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/04/06/another-one-bites-the-dust-flexcoin/ http://hackingdistributed.com/2014/04/06/another-one-bites-t...

bcantrill 12y ago
I came from Sun Fishworks as well, and still have an engineering team without titles (everyone is a "Software Engineer"). This is deliberate[1], and I don't think it's been an impediment -- there is certainly not a problem with "yapping and nipping." Of course, every organization is different, and what works for one group of people may not work for another -- but I can't personally imagine working in an organization that insisted on hierarchical titles among its engineers. [1] http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/surge2013 http://www.slideshare.net/bcantrill/surge2013