Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Or more generally: Job titles aren’t portable between companies in the tech industry. Don’t assume that they mean the same thing at every company. Don’t assume a company is underpaying people just because they’re giving out Principal Software Engineer titles. Principal Software Engineer at one company could just be the equivalent of Senior Software Engineer II at another company.

On the hiring side, everyone knows that titles only indicate relative seniority within a company. Interviewers must actually interview candidates to determine what their role was, how experienced they are, and other factors.

It can be a warning flag, however, if a company is giving titles like “Principal Staff Software Architect” to someone who is clearly junior enough that they would require a lot of mentoring and guidance if they were hired. It’s common that candidates are resistant to downleveling their titles when changing jobs, so handing out enormously inflated titles is one way companies try to trap junior employees in their companies. At least until they realize that nobody cares about their inflated titles and they still have to pass the same tech interviews as everyone else.

As someone whose first job title was "Assistant Director of IT," and who did nothing but write really bad PHP for a couple hours every day, this tracks with my experience. It also made interviewing harder because if you get a resume from someone with one job they've had for two years, and that job is Assistant Director, you're probably - rightfully - trashing that resume. I eventually learned to just change the title but then explain on first contact that my actual title was different, it just didn't bear any relation to what I was actually doing.

I had the inverse experience: I worked for a startup that gave literally everyone in the engineering department the same title of “Senior Software Engineer” in the HR system because they had one boilerplate offer letter used for everyone.

I was a manager-of-managers, but officially I was a “senior software engineer”. Burned me badly on a couple reference checks, until I specifically started explaining the situation during interviews.

At one of my jobs, all the developers were given the title "Member of Technical Staff" because our boss had worked at a particle accelerator (he had a PhD in physics) and that's what the scientists running experiments had on their badges. He did it for morale, and it probably did make us feel a bit fancier while we were writing Grails and GWT code.

I think this is pretty common at early stage YC companies. At least the one I started at did this until they needed to give us fancy titles to impress investors.

I've always thought of "Member of Technical Staff" as a Bell Labs thing.

I almost did it at my last startup, to signal the egalitarian, cooperative engineering culture that I intended. One of the concerns was that it could hurt people's career mobility out (and willingness to join, since the startup was unlikely to be the engineer's home for the next few decades until retirement).

I think it works easily when your organization is known as one of the places to go, everyone knows that they do titles that way, and that anyone there is worth considering as a hire. (But not when recruiters filter their resume keyword searches for senior, staff, or principal.)

I don't know why Google didn't do it, way back when, since they did a few other culture things. I suppose that might've set a different tone for our industry today. (Though what seemed at the time to be low-loyalty culture coming out of California was already in force when Google started, most conspicuously in what I called "IPO-hopping", and maybe Google just had to work within that, at the time.)

Well, every dev is listed as "Software Engineer" unless they change it specifically. Maybe you're forced to change it if you're a manager, but I'm unsure of that. So you never exactly know the level of the person you're talking to unless you work with them a lot or go out of your way to look it up.

I think it's sort of a labs (whether national labs or more broadly) thing. I have a good friend who works for one of the national labs subcontractors and they use the technical staff terminology.

I always thought it originated in vmware but maybe they are copycats too. There are lot of these places around the valley big and small

Yup. And I always am weary of any manager at a startup. They think just because they were a manager at a startup, it means they can be a manager at a much larger company. How many people did you manage? (some of them managed 1 person) What did you actually manage? (can't explain other than order people around) Don't assume the title means they know how to actually do the job at your company. Titles tend to be severely inflated at small startups.

I had a job as a VP a few years back… at a six-person startup. I cringe when I list that job on my resume - do I lie and list the title accurately (I was a programmer with a massively inflated title) or report what my actual given title was and risk being seen as misleading?

The vast majority of titles in tech confer more prestige than deserved, because there's no downside to a company handing them out like candy. I don't look at it as a portability issue, the incentive isn't to be accurate to begin with. Inflated seniority is just a perk they can offer that doesn't cost them any money, so everyone offers it. Titles across the industry are meaningless unless you're calibrated to that company's levels.

There are only a few titles that mean anything, and normally it isn't what you think.

Legal at a bank only a vice president or higher can make some loan decisions. Thus if you go to a large chain bank to get a mortgage you will talk to a vice president. Their title must be vice president, but they doesn't make a lot of money, and don't have much power other than the ability to give you a mortgage.

Last time I posted the above someone chimed in "yeah, even though all I do is write code all day I'm a vice president because what my code does can only be done by a vice president"

You also see a lot of salesmen who are vice presidents - again they don't have a lot of power in the company, but the places they sell to want to talk to a vice president so sales hands out those titles.

> there's no downside to a company handing them out like candy.

Some companies believe this, but I don't think it's true. Handing out titles like candy can kill morale.

I get what you're saying but I think it generally does the opposite. People like prestige.

This reminds of a story I encountered in finance where everyone in the department got a bump in title as their bonus. I asked one what was difference in their role: nothing. Since everyone got bumped, everyone's role stayed the same. This was during the financial crisis and was the bank's (well known) cheap ass way to get away without paying a monetary bonus.

My very first job was 'senior'.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com