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Comment by throwarayes | Hacker News Reader

Title inflation is real.

2 years ago I was hired as Staff with pretty high bar to clear.

This year I know a team where all the seniors complain they’re not Staff, and now half the team are Staff engs.

i had a job where i was the first staff, but when they started promoting everyone to staff cause every senior wanted a promotion, they had to create new levels of staff to differentiate

Why not just go all in?

* Engineer First Class

* Special Engineer

* First Engineer

* Staff Engineer

* Staff Engineer First Class

* Principal Engineer

* Staff Engineer Major

* Principal Engineer First Class

* Staff Engineer of the Office

etc. Need matching insignia on the collar, of course.

I was under the impression that Staff just meant you have some sort of leadership role, as opposed to just being an individual contributor. Is that not the case?

IC just means you don't have reports, and neither Staff nor Principal roles typically have reports.

Yeah for us it means you have a team tech leadership role.

It’s hard to imagine a team where everyone is “leading”. Some people have to be doing.

TBH I doubt the actual work people are doing has changed. It’s more about status and salary.

The only job in the tech industry that's not some sort of leadership role is Intern. Everyone leads and mentors. Senior Engineers at the level of a single team, with perhaps some cross-team impact. Staff Engineers at the level of an org with several teams.

Many are lucky enough to work on their own or with other seniors in their respected domains.

Someone should tell HBO that, their Staff titles come before Senior Software Engineer, which is very confusing.

Same with IBM, very confusing

Yes because everyone is resigning. L+1 today is easily what L was 2-3 years ago.

Possibly they're just better than you were 2 years ago? Tech education moves as quickly as tech itself

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