I have seen this happen more and more in tech as well. Engineers join a company right out of college, are promoted to "senior" in a couple of years, and "staff" another two or three years after that. Now because everyone is staff you have to keep making up fancier titles – senior staff, principal engineer, technical lead, architect, senior architect, chief of staff, partner engineer, distinguished engineer, technical fellow...
I asked a higher up why this was the case, and the response was simply that people quit if they aren't promoted quick enough. Titles are free, and smaller companies have zero problems handing them out like candy to keep people happy.
It's worth noting that "engineer" itself is a bit of title inflation. "Software engineer" was supposed to involve training people to apply engineering methodologies to software development. Today it's just a fancy term for "programmer".
I have always referred to my trade as "programmer". I'm not a trained engineer. My title-inflation path was something like this:
- Sales Support Analyst
- Sales Support Specialist
- Senior Support Analyst
- Software Engineer
- Senior Developer
I have nothing against the professionalisation of programming; it would be a good thing. But the fact remains that the great majority of programmers are not engineers. We are tradesmen, a bit like plumbers or domestic electricians. There's nothing to be ashamed of in being a skilled tradesman; for a good part of my career, a plumber earned more than I did.
Over the years I've found "software developer" feels the best. It works as a rough description, it doesn't step on the toes of engineering disciplines, it's distinct from other areas of IT like systems administration or networking.
This is the case in France as well, but it's more subtle than that.
Engineer ("ingénieur") is both a diploma, a status, and a title.
The diploma is regulated by a committee that endorses curriculum for colleges so that they can deliver an engineering degree. It indeed requires some specific training, and not all schools have the endorsement. There _is_ a difference between "I have an MSc in X" and "I am an engineer in X". I think this is what you are referring to.
The status can be earned by having the diploma or getting a recognition of skill by experience. It's usually useless in private companies, but opens the door to better social security in public and institutional services.
The title (as in job title) is unregulated and can be given to anyone.
Well, in French context, one should also add that "X" is often used as an abbreviation for "École polytechnique" - the most prestigious engineering school in France and one of the top 3 most coveted diplomas one can have in the country overall (probably after ENA and maybe HEC in certain contexts).
from wikipedia In 2019, President Emmanuel Macron announced he would propose to abolish and replace the ENA. Macron is an ENA graduate himself, but the tight network of ENA graduates influencing the French civil service has been decried by populist protests such as the yellow vests movement as an elite governing class out of touch with the lower social classes. In April 2021, Macron confirmed the closure of the school, calling the closure "the most important reform of the senior public service" since the school's creation in 1945. In January 2022, it has been replaced by the Institut national du service public (INSP).
IMHO you got this slightly wrong: ENA has not been closed, it has merely been renamed to INSP. Which is to say, that there was no true reform in this regard.
In the same way business schools are really networks or clubs (there is little learning taking place at BS..), ENA is a club for the highest-ranking civil servants in the country (i.e. no learning happens at ENA/INSP, merely co-opting into the club of those who then should serve the country but instead gut the state for the benefit of their class).
It's a protected title in most jurisdictions but it's seldom enforced or have exceptions for "software engineer"
Although I've heard Professional Engineers Ontario made enough noise awhile back and big tech companies had to rename their local job descriptions to "developer"
A bit ironic that practicing members of Professional Engineers Ontario almost certainly depend on software written by "non-engineers" to successfully do their work.
Difference is that in most jurisdictions those professional engineers are liable if people die because of negligence, the software engineers are most definitively not
I believe it's more likely for a professional engineer to be liable, but surely in projects of any reasonably large scale there would be several layers of engineering management and oversight such that the engineer working on a part of the puzzle wouldn't be liable for a greater architectural flaw...?
For example, the Boeing 737 MAX had a high level fatal flaw that existed because of a mismatched collection of arguably correct or valid hardware and software systems. The engineers who designed the more forward set engines probably did their jobs correctly, and the software "engineers" who built the pitch up correction software presumably didn't write bugs. However, the combination of the two were primary factors in the fatal accidents.
The key is that if it requires some sort of certification, as Canada claims it does, then it should be a modifier/adjective on the title like "certified janitor" or "licensed engineer".
Just claiming an existing single common noun as an exclusive term belonging to your organization is clearly an untenable position. If you have to keep reminding everyone that they're infringing on your trademark all the time by using a common word, you've already lost.
only if they are to be prosecuted in case of toilet malfunction!
A long time ago in Paris the street sweepers were euphemistically called "surface engineering technicians" (paraphrasing from the French "technicien de surface", but I think this is close enough)...
Take away the software, and how do the professional engineers work? No CAD. No structural analysis. No fluid dynamics simulations.
I think that's a bit harder to replace than it is to clean a dirty toilet. Presumably the professional engineers can clean their own toilet if absolutely necessary.
>Is engineering the same now as it was before software?
The core concepts which make engineering engineering? Yeah.
>The group that wants to protect or maintain ownership of the word "engineer" is dependent upon the people whom it objects to also using that title.
They are as dependent on software as any other institution, on a day-to-day basis, which have transitioned to computerized automation over the last ~60 years. Software aids efficiency.
The argument that engineers are incapable of designing and constructing sound solutions without software is unsound.
Yeah, same in germany. Being an "Ingenieur" requires an academic degree (and studying computer science doesn't grant you the title of "Ingenieur" anyway...)
> and studying computer science doesn't grant you the title of "Ingenieur" anyway
That's not correct. E.g., consider the relevant section in the Bavarian engineering law[1] (using Google Translate):
> The job title engineer alone or in a word combination may use,
> (1) Anyone who has successfully completed an undergraduate degree at a state or state-recognized German university
> a) in a technical-scientific subject,
> b) which has a standard period of study of at least six full-time semesters and with which at least 180 points can be acquired using the ECTS system and
> c) in which the areas of mathematics, computer science, natural sciences and technology predominate; this requirement does not apply to people who have completed an undergraduate degree in industrial engineering and only use the professional title in the word combination industrial engineer
Further, my diploma for a Bachelor's in Computer Science from TUM contains the passage:
> The graduate is entitled to employ the designation Engineer alone or as part of a compound word.
I remember (many years ago, so it may be obsolete info) that there was some difference with a "Diplom Ingenieur", or at least I knew a few german Civil Engineers that took some pride in the "Diplom" part.
I don’t think that degree is granted anywhere anymore.
I believe around 2005 most german universities switched to granting masters and bachelors, usually „of Science“ for technical subjects. The title is in english, also in german language context.
Entwickler is pretty common in Berlin, but I've not quantified it as a percentage as I'm definitely not close to C1 standard even now, and have always skipped such adverts in the past: https://www.stepstone.de/jobs/entwickler/in-berlin
And Berlin is (I'm told by everyone here) much more English language than anywhere else in Germany.
For conservative big names engineering like Bosch, Simenns or traditional mittlestand companies that mostly operate with German customers, yes they still use it. Xing is full of German only job ads.
But for software only companies operating international looking to attract foreign talent off LinkeIn, no, it's all English.
As a counterpoint, my "Software Engineering" degree was accredited by our national engineering professional body... to be deemed a "chartered software engineer" I'd have to pay dues and get a referral from a practising engineer. I know one guy who did it, but it confers very few advantages that I can see...
Yeah, I admit I'm a sucker for the "engineer" title but what I do makes me feel more like a tradesman then an engineer.
At the same time, I remember last year someone interviewed a bunch of non-software engineers who later got into software [1]. A good number of these folks actually do feel like software is still engineering.
I have friends who are traditional engineers, and in a lot of ways software development is far more rigorous.
They rarely have reviews, don't have tests, rarely do something equivalent to pair programming etc.
The flip side is that traditional engineering is generally easier to reason about and with a lot of experience you can tell if something is wrong. Doesn't apply so much in software.
I have no idea what you are talking about. Software engineering is far less rigorous as I have experienced it.
The amount of review and testing that goes into a single design industrial design is massive by comparison, since you cannot fix a 400 million dollar assembly as easily as code.
In the physical sciences, 'bug's often mean you will injure or kill an employee. The standards are extremely high.
In my time as an electrical engineer, there were many cases where I would book a flight to visit another company/site or consult with an academic/consultants. Also I would fly people in regularly to look at our plant. I never needed approval to bring in external reviewers and pay out billable hours. That sort of practice is unthinkable in software engineering.
I'm curious what sort of work you did since you mention a plant. Some work in both software and traditional engineering is going to be held to higher standards, so I think it can be hard to compare.
For example, another commenter mentioned aviation. I would fully expect that industry to be more rigorous with both their software and physical engineering.
> since you cannot fix a 400 million dollar assembly as easily as code
Have you never seen these projects go wrong? I find that people often imply that things don't break and projects don't fail in traditional engineering when that actually seems to happen more often than most people would think.
For example, a ~$30M council parking building project in my city had to be demolished midway through the project because they messed up the design and it was structurally unsound.
I dunno, I used to work at a company that designed equipment that built high-end measurement equipment.
For a given product, we had a custom PCB with FPGAs and the circuit board guys needed to follow a tons of design rules, then ran a ton of signal integrity and electronic interference simulations etc.
I was in the team who wrote the algorithms and 'software' for FPGA, we worked out the best approach using math on pen and paper, wrote a working prototype in MATLAB, designed the digital logic, implemented a high level but bit-accurate
C++ model, and only then started on the HDL implentation, which we verified against the C++ one.
> wrote a working prototype in MATLAB, designed the digital logic, implemented a high level but bit-accurate C++ model, and only then started on the HDL implentation, which we verified against the C++ one
If you ever looked at how MATLAB, the HDL compiler, and the formal verification tool are implemented, even "mechanic" seems like way too much fancy title. The very old phrase "if architects designed buildings like developers built software, the first woodpecker would have caused the downfall of western civilization" comes to mind.
I am a software consultant who has worked in CAD software, which gives me quite some insight in this topic (software developers vs non-software engineers). Ironically, most of the time what's causing the problem is non-software engineers working on these tools, since engineers don't effectively translate their methodology into software (they don't see it as necessary, they don't understand the sources of complexity, they don't have training, etc.) , resulting in a very cowboy attitude to software development.
Would you mind sharing what kind of engineering your friends do where they don't do any testing? I would like to avoid these products/roads/buildings/etc. Thanks.
What kind of testing do you think I mean? There are building codes and inspections, but I couldn't call those "testing".
E: no testing might be an overstatement, but I think it's closer to no tests than an abundance of tests. Engineers tend to not get their hands dirty, which basically leaves computer simulations.
You can tick all the boxes and still do a shit job that either doesn't meet requirements or fails. It happens more often than you might think.
In most engineering domains, testing is a proper specialty. So design engineers don't do the testing themselves and get "their hands dirty", but testing does happen.
I've been working on airliner design and have ordered, specified, and reviewed a fair number of mechanical tests. Yet I've never actually built and ran the test rig myself, it's a full time job for specialists.
Over on the other side of the iron curtain “engineer” was/is a title that is earned formally in college. Being an engineer in this culture means something more than a job title.
I can see though how this would be an issue - in my experience there is a significant difference in quality between developers who just learned how to program on their own, and the developers who hold that engineering degree.
As a non-engineer I will take this as encouragement.
From what I've seen around me, the ones holding the engineering titles simply are more methodical in how they search for a pattern or key to how something works. They will have a better vocabulary to explain themselves too.
But maybe they aren't as good in thinking outside the box?
Kind of like how someone who has completed a formal philosophical education will usually be better figuring out the ins and outs of a particular text but not necessarily will have what it takes to come up with their own? Not sure - I'm a humanities kind of guy who works with engineers.
Not to discourage you, but I've also observed the same pattern of autodidacts being better than traditional engineers... at least for those who stay in tech.
I've seen a lot of self-taught developers or bootcamp grads switch industry or try to move to "tech-adjacent" roles. Making it as an individual contributor is, in my experience, pretty rare.
To me the term "Engineer" means that someone holds an Engineering degree. And that degree allows me to make certain assumptions about what the Engineer knows.
For instance, I expect anyone holding such a degree (wherever they studied) and claiming to be a software engineer to have:
- A solid background in mathematics, at least applied.
- A solid background in Computer Science (algorithm, data-structures, discreet math)
- A solid background in Applied Computer Science (networking, operating system, build system, electronics, databases). I expect them to have built a few non-trivial projects.
- A knowledge of project management (what's a Gant chart, waterfall, agile methodologies) and economics (able to read financial statements and understand basic accounting and corporate structure) not CFA level of course.
- Communication abilities (I expect them to have written papers and technical reports as part of their degree).
Two out of these five elements are domain-specific; the rest is universal across engineering disciplines.
Note that you don't need an engineering degree to know all that; John Carmack would tick all these boxes. But he's an exception.
Google snippets aren’t helping me in my search for general principles of engineering. Any certified engineers care to share? Or someone want to ask chatGPT to confabulate some?
The core thing that I think differentiates software engineering and programming is accountability for the quality and ethics of what you design. If an engineer designs and signs off on something, they are legally accountable for if it. There is mandatory ethics training at university and people refuse to sign off on work they don’t understand or aren’t confident in. Engineering assurance and management of change processes are the opposite of “move fast and break things”.
As far as I can see there is no ethical accountability for the programmers at big tech companies. People are happy to pocket the crazy salaries and claim their managers or execs should be blamed for the damaging outcomes of their work.
As someone who has done "ethics training" as part of an engineering degree, I don't believe for a second that it has a significant impact on the choices most engineers would make in their jobs.
Sure it helps to have established bodies to hold engineers accountable and report violations to, but I certainly don't think the ethics training is a significant factor. There's no shortage of degreed engineers signing off on things far more ethically questionable than most of what big tech is doing.
This also sounds pretty optimistic as a generalisation:
> people refuse to sign off on work they don't understand or aren't confident in
So the hordes of Electrical Engineers slaving away at Apple and Intel and all the rest — these people, and not their bosses, have legal accountability for every harebrained thing they are required to implement?
The idea is drawn from things like structural engineers signing off bridges - where there's probably only one on a project, and if they won't sign off the design, neither will any other structural engineer.
I doubt it'll ever get adopted in the software industry, because we have many competent people doing good work without a software engineering degree, and degrees of low enough quality employers do whiteboard coding tests at interview, so there's not really a notion of a 'properly qualified' programmer.
Yes. If they designed something they knew was unsafe, or they were negligent in their design, or they misrepresented their competency I would expect them to be accountable for their actions as a professional electrical engineer.
I do have an engineering degree in France, but even then I think the "software engineer" title is just wrong. There is little actual engineering going on in most development jobs (most. Some do have actual engineering).
At least in France, the biggest difference between an engineering degree and someone who learned by themselves are going to be:
* the engineer should have more general knowledge about databases, algorithms etc.. and generally how things work. Someone who didn't get that training might not have as deep an understanding in those fundamental concepts (that gap is sometime very very visible when working together). That's the most important part in the day-to-day.
* the engineer will have at least a decent English level. Not an issue in English-speaking country obviously, but that's actually the number 1 reason some students don't get their degree in schools I know.
* the engineer should be able to present well his ideas, and generally be at least good in communication. There is formal training to speak in public. If you are shy by nature, this may not come easy without formal training.
That's about it. There is no special skill that someone determined cannot acquire by themselves with freely available training and experience, but when you are a teenager with little self-motivation, it helps to get all this drilled into you. On the other hand, I wouldn't hire most people coming out of my own school, so take it with a grain of salt.
If I would to meet somebody who claims to apply engineering principles or, worse, scientific method, I will make sure to be on top of their PRs at all times.
It does. We are just not used to looking at it like this.
For example, if you are changing labels or adding buttons to a web app according to detailed instructions from a manager, then I would call that "programming".
If you are implementing an OAuth flow, or designing an API for some service, and doing so according to the current state of the art, you are "engineering".
If you develop a novel algorithm to solve a specific class of problems, you are "computer sciencing".
Obviously, there is some overlap between the tasks, and people will switch between the different parts depending on the stage of the project, but I don't think the titles can be chosen randomly.
Someone who programs. Less tautologically, someone who uses a computer to do something that takes computerless humans, say, O(nx) time and completes the task in significantly less than O(nx) time.
As for who I'd want to hire? Probably just the programmers who can do it correctly faster than most. Whether they're writing Python or hacking spreadsheets, they are programming a computer, and therefore, they are a programmer.
There's very little objective about "software engineering" beyond fitting the specification and not running too slow. Almost every "rule" can be challenged, as it makes assumptions about the human brain, which is not well understood.
That's like saying an electrical engineer is just a fancy name for a PCB designer. A mechanical engineer is just a fancy name for someone that uses solid works. An optics engineer is just a fancy name for someone who plays with light simulators.
You can't just trivialize what people are doing and then call it not engineering.
I don't mean to trivialize the work that programmers do. (Okay, maybe the ones who just copy and paste from Stack Overflow all day.) I'm an electronics engineer, but I've spent most of my professional life programming. It's legitimate technical work. But not all technical work is engineering. Would you call a programmer a mathematician just because computer science is a branch of mathematics?
People who write the software that controls a nuclear reactor are definitely applying engineering principles (If they're not, then the world has a problem). Does that make them engineers? I would argue it does.
The problem with the programming profession is that it's possible to get away with not applying good engineering principles. It's only in domains like the nuclear industry, or the military (fighter planes etc.) where we can really imagine the consequences of buggy software.
Software Engineer is a title that reminds of how we should be approaching the programming problem.
I think this phenomenon with "senior" happens because we don't have an equivalent to "apprentice", "journeyman", and "master", and several of these terms would be considered inappropriate if we did. Senior has effectively become "journeyman", and Staff has become "master". And then Senior Staff, Principal, etc. are higher levels of mastery of the craft. It sort of makes sense.
Some people with 1-2 years of experience really are significantly qualitatively different than others with that few years of experience. Some people with 5 years really are able to run teams and build large systems independently. It shouldn't be about the years alone.
Edit to add: Also, after 4 years intense studying it could be said that every software engineer with a Bachelors degree has already passed through the apprentice phase, their first 1, 2, or 3 years might legitimately be their journeyman phase, and so after a couple of years they might legitimately be "senior" in the sense of being an independent expert practitioner. Remember that we're talking about a person who has now spent 5-7 years of their life developing these skills, and possibly more before they attended university.
(And it then makes sense that the next step up would either be Staff or Architect as their skills grow to handle more complex organizational matters or even more complex software systems respectively.)
Now obviously that is NOT true of a large number of people who don't apply themselves in school or in their jobs, and so just sit in their chairs watching the clock until they have enough years of experience to be "senior", but a person who applies themselves can achieve a level of capability in a couple years that the person who does not apply themselves might never achieve in their entire career.
My last boss used to appoint "apprentices". They would stay as apprentices for all of 6 months (I think they got a tax-break for having apprentices). Traditionally, an apprentice in a trade would be indentured for several years, studying/serving under a master.
After completing his apprenticeship, the new tradesman would be kicked out, and barred from working in the same city as his master; he was expected to travel around and broaden his experience. That might last a decade. He'd then have to convince his trade guild that he now qualified as a master, often by presenting an exceptional piece of work (a "masterpiece").
It's often said that it takes a decade to learn anything really well. I think that applies equally to programming. So the "journeyman" stage fits in with that, as a way of designating someone's skill level. But the "apprentices" I worked with were doing exactly the same work as everyone else; we were all fungible programmers. In 45 years in the industry, I worked with approximately two people I'd designate as "master".
There is supposed to be a gap between "journeyman" and "senior". The place where competent workers who don't need supervision but aren't going to design a system or coordinate a project are. The programmers/software engineers/default-noun-for-job.
But we do have that (based on legal industry titles). Typically they're called "associates". Some companies even have "senior associate" (ie, not lowest rung) before losing the "associate" prefix on their next title (whether it's engineer, or consultant or whatever).
It’s even worse than just title inflation. Orgs lose the plot when they lose their calibration against the rest of the industry. These senior engineering roles have well understood requirements: cross org influence, leading a project independently from inception to completion, understanding business impact and keeping senior management in the loop. The problems come when your cross org engineering influence is “move our source code from shared drive to github” and keeping senior management in the loop means chatting about it over takeout with your roomies who are also the CTO and VP of Design.
So, the fact that everyone is in a small startup instead of a bug corporate “is” the problem of job inflation (After all, when I started my product alone for 4 years, I sacred myself CEO).
- Everyone-in-a-startup is a side-effect of incredible automation where every competent engineer can leverage dozens of automations, CI/CD, automatic accounting and SAAS products. It’s a real capacity of coordinating.
- Titles will readjust. Titles will mean nothing. They should mean nothing. We’ve already given up reading the degree/diploma of programmers, skills matter more. Software development is so erratic and devspeed is so much due to individual talent that single founders with 50 employees can sell themselves to Facebook for 18 billions. When we can get predictable results out of software engineering, we’ll discuss how to position each one in a hierarchy.
I'm not convinced that big organisations teach you more than smaller ones, given how hands on you have to be at a smaller shop and how sclerotic larger ones are.
You learn a lot more about the process itself in smaller companies across the board. In larger companies that only happens in the higher level roles. In larger companies your secondary and tertiary skills also become significantly more important.
Ultimately I prefer working with people that have experience in both.
Engineers who've only worked in smaller companies tend to be harder to work *with*, on a social inter-colleague level.
Engineers who've only worked in larger companies tend to be less capable when left to their own devices, they need more help if there is less demarcation. Engineers who've worked in smaller teams tend to pick up the slack proactively, from larger teams retro-actively.
At least that's been my experience both from within as well as without. (Currently working for a small company that has large corporate clients, have worked for small and corporations before that)
Engineers who've only worked in smaller companies tend to be harder to work with, on a social inter-colleague level.
I definitely skew that way - anything in particular I might want to watch out for, that would play out as "hard to work with" in a big company setting?
- Inability to play politics for longer than 2hrs, let alone months,
- Self-selection, skilled people go to startups, and people who can maintain interest despite tons of paperwork to fill in, go to large companies (sometimes they’re as skilled, but it’s not the most important, 80% as skilled and able to run through processes is better).
>the response was simply that people quit if they aren't promoted quick enough
Our company has grades instead: J0, J1, P1, S2 etc. So if someone is a junior, they can be "promoted" 2 times (J0 => J1 => J2) before becoming a "pro" (P1), and 2 more times before becoming a senior (P1 => P2 => S1). The official titles are still just "junior engineer", "senior engineer" etc.
As a consequence, since in other companies they often promote just "junior => senior", when we hire someone who was previously a "senior", they are often assigned a junior grade (for example, J2) which often demotivates people
It's not just tech companies. I've seen non-tech companies with internal engineering teams hire mid-level skill people at Principal Engineer. By their measure, actual Staff to Principal engineers would be something like Distinguished Engineer, Senior Distinguished Engineer, or Executive Distinguished Engineer.
The heart of the problem is that most companies have no real path that isn't into management.
VP in banks is one title that means something. A VP is able to sign off on your getting a loan from the bank. This is a legal thing, someone who isn't a VP cannot give you a loan. (the rules are a bit more complex, but close enough). Thus banks of lots of VPs with very little power: they need people all over who can give loans out.
The title change itself has real value to people. People love to feel a sense of progress, and they love to feel appreciated. Promoting the same person twicw over N years, instead of once, may cost the same but will make the employee happier. That's the free part.
And just like monetary inflation, this inflation's cost is hidden in the devaluation of the inflated commodity. 'Senior Engineer' used to be a title that people valued highly, as a result of the years of work it took to earn. Now nobody's impressed by such a title.
> The title change itself has real value to people.
Not to me. A "title promotion" without a pay rise would be demotivating, and lead me to wonder what I had to do to get a pay rise - like, leave, maybe.
That's fair - my first sentence maybe isn't always true in isolation , but I think in the context of the second one it is. Obviously it'd be ideal to invent new ranks between the existing ones, instead of the inflation.
If you are 2 years out of college you might not know what that compensation should be. You might not even know what the increased responsibility of the title should be.
But you do appreciate the bragging rights of the title, and so that is all you get.
E.g., senior means I'm officially leet. Not that I have responsibilities.
Of course you get a pay raise. Inflation means that you should get a 2-3% pay raise every year - and this past year you should have got a 7-8% raise.
Most people don't index their raises to inflation, a few years of 2% raises against 0% inflation looks pretty good, and they have a nice new title along with the raise. Never mind their real income is now less than it was a last year, they got a title and a raise.
I can't figure out how to get inflation through to whoever decides what raises should be - at any company I've ever been at. I would encourage everyone reading this to head into wage review discussions with the current yearly inflation number and make sure you boss knows it. Most companies seem to get slightly negative raises (measured against inflation), and then every 5-10 years a 10% across the board raise to bring everyone back in line with inflation.
If lower level engineers were well treated, then I think that they would feel less pressure to be promoted. As the saying goes "shit flows down hill" and software development has a lot of shit.
Funny. Looks like I'm traveling down the demotion path as we've grown.
Literally started as Support Manager which basically meant that the tech support phone was on my desk in a four-person company. The three other people were the CEO, Software Development Manager and Hardware Development Manager.
Next, I became a Senior Software Developer, because a customer contract required seniors assigned to a project.
Now I'm a Software Specialist which basically means bottom of the bin in the title hierarchy here.
> Titles are free, and smaller companies have zero problems handing them out like candy to keep people happy.
It’s in everyone’s best interest except for the industry as a whole. It’s why a “distinguished fellow” has to do the same inane leetcode grind as a fresh grad or someone with no degree who really likes computers.
I still don’t understand how ‘architect’ is an acceptable title. Here in the uk at least it’s a protected title, much like (medical) doctor and you can’t practice and call yourself an architect without approval from their governing body (the arb). Apparently that doesn’t apply to software developers though somehow?
The Act that regulates the title 'architect' contained a specific clause that says "(2) Subsection (1) does not prevent any use of the designation "naval architect", "landscape architect" or "golf-course architect"."
I think it's pretty safe to say that software architect would have been included in that carve-out if it was written today, and the ARB says: "We take a common sense approach to the use of ‘architect’ that isn’t connected to building and design, for example with ‘software architect’ or ‘systems architect’ which are increasingly used by the computer and IT industry." https://arb.org.uk/architect-information/what-we-do-to-regul...
Since the only way it is regulated is by the ARB bringing action against a person, their decision to ignore software architects is pretty final.
A friend at Visa worked there straight out of college after completing a 5 year BS/MS program, and on his resume it says he went straight from "intern" to "senior engineer" because an MS degree apparently automatically makes you senior.
In a world where 2 years of experience can make you 'senior', I could understand that someone who went for a 2 year MS instead of BS + 2YOE would think they are on the same level.
One issue I've noticed is in organisations that have staff in regions that don't have title inflation. For example in the UK orgs I've worked the majority of people were not particularly concerned about titles and didn't even put titles in their email sigs. When some offshore temp contractors came onsite and gave themselves grandiose titles in their email sigs that were far above the people they reported to it created a lot of confusion and consternation.
I've also seen issues when UK colleagues who are senior enough to manage teams who manage teams, but are still below the "Director" role, then have to manage an entire team of "Directors" and "VPs" in NA who are the bottom rung and manage nobody. It seems like the job titles in NA can be totally meaningless? I suppose if you are used to how it works, it works fine, but if you are from a region with more conservative (and accurate?) titles it causes friction due to an imbalance in perceived power dynamic.
I've even seen an org chart in a NA firm that has 3 CTOs stretching down the same reporting line, which just seems pointless.
Because a big4 gave them their org structure used in their industry, and applied with people they had. That's how I am teaching what is an api gateway to the cloud integration team 2 years after their existence.
It is totally unbelievable how many “vice-presidents” a company can have. It distorts the meaning of the word to the point that it really is not vice in any way. Much less president…
Am I right in believing that US vice presidents are officers of the company, and can sign contracts on the company's behalf? I was once told by a VP of Marketing that because he was a veep and could sign contracts, he had a fiduciary duty to his employer, and was constrained in the kinds of thing he was allowed to say.
Yes, a VP can legally make decisions on behalf of a company that normal people cannot. As such some industries will have more VPs than others.
When you get a loan (ie for a normal house) a vice president is probably required to sign off on it. Thus banks have vice presidents at most/all branch locations. Their pay, responsibility, and influence is pretty small in the company, but they are a vice president because that title is legally required to make the routine decisions they make every day.
The top salesmen in most companies also get a vice president title because customers fell important customers if a vice president is assigned to talk to them. Of course a vice president is allowed to make some decisions so they should (but may not) avoid promising things as it could be legally binding.
Not necessarily. In the financial world, VP is a title that they hand out like candy. I worked at Bank of America as a Senior Software Engineer but my title was VP. I almost turned down the job because I thought they’d made a mistake and were hiring me into a management role.
Many companies have a policy that you can’t give someone a real raise without a promotion. In tech, this means everyone good gets an annual promotion at some firms.
> [..] people quit if they aren't promoted quick enough. Titles are free, and smaller companies have zero problems handing them out like candy to keep people happy.
My experience is that those same people quit once they are promoted. They are playing a game of ladders. It might be your corporate ladder they are trying to climb but most likely it is someone else's. They want that Senior Engineering title so that they can hop to the next organization without putting in the work to achieve that title at that company. And, it works. Some of my former coworkers have been hired for jobs far above their skillsets and it's on those hiring companies for not being able to assess competence. I have had employees from my company with only four years of experience leave for a VPE title. I wouldn't trust them as an engineering manager or senior engineer reviewing code let alone a VPE but companies are desperate and they were charismatic enough to BS their way through interviews. I always smile when that happens because I know which company will likely go out of business since they can't assess skillsets without titles. These companies are willing to pay way more money for far less talent and well that's the stupidity tax these companies get to pay.
If recruiters are going to farm talent from smaller companies, as they do, I will ensure from here on out that externally all of my duds have Senior, Principle, or Distinguished engineering titles. I will hand them a grenade with the pin removed... Electrons to bits they hire them without evaluating skills or experience. ;) I'll give my exceptional talent titles like Level 1-M.U. (Level 1 being our highest most prestigious rank, the title being master of the universe, or whatever.)
This is the game companies they have created since they can't assess competence and corporate recruiters only know how to search LinkedIn for titles. They made that bed, now they can sleep in it :)
Jokes aside, I was only burnt a few times by employees wanting titles in order to jump ship quickly. I now recognize my coworkers with accolades, great pay, flexibility, and treating them like the intelligent adults that they are. Collaborating with them. Being transparent. If they still want to quit because I won't give them a title too soon and their ego simply cannot get past that, it's just not a great fit and I don't want to keep them from fulfilling the needs of their ego at their next job. That being said, the right people get the right titles at the right time, and in between then, there are a lot of ways I promote people culturally without giving them a title too soon.
Most people just want meaningful work, paid well, and only after those two have been addressed, then do they want recognition. Don't get me wrong, they want recognition too but a lot of poorly managed companies don't understand what meaningful work and paying employees well means so they hand out titles as quickly as they can. Heck, they don't understand what recognition is either if the best they can do is hand out a title.
PS; I am definitely not saying that is what is happening at your company or with your higher ups. I am just over here hyperbolically weaving fantastical yarns of fanciful prose to amuse and illuminate at 0530AM MST.
I was just talking to someone about this the other day. I personally don't care what my title is, as far as things like self-worth and ego are concerned. But what I do care about is scope of work and who I get to influence with my work. And for that, it seems like most everyone else cares about titles. And so I'm forced to care too if I want to get done what I need to get done.
Up until recently everyone at Netflix was a Senior Software Engineer if they were an individual contributor. This worked great within Netflix, as you just did what you needed to do and everyone respected that you were doing the right thing. But it was troublesome if you ever wanted to leave Netflix, because you may have been doing what Principle Engineers do at other companies, but when you apply there they tell you "Well you were a Senior Engineer so the best we can do is Staff Engineer". Until it became well known what Netflix was doing, it was hard to get even an equivalent set of duties elsewhere.
One of my largest career mistakes was telling my employer i didn’t care about titles when they were offering to do something for me when they didn’t have the money to give me a raise. I have thus been stuck for quite a long time in “Sr” purgatory.
This is effectively what I was initially going to add ( I made a similar mistake ), but let me elaborate on it a little bit. While in an abstract there is no reason to care about the title ( I have a ridiculous title compared to what I actually do now despite being an IC ), but depending on the environment you are in ( finance comes to mind ), you will almost automatically fall under different band with HR for salary/benefits package. I wish this stuff was properly standardized, but every company does their own thing ( and does what it can to ensure it is hard to compare your job title to one at another company just in case employee has a bright idea they can compare competing salaries ).
Thank you! It is hard to believe I was not aware of that tool. I am glad someone saw an issue and attempted to solve it. It actually gave me a clearer picture of a path forward that until now was kinda shrouded in a fog of war. I hate information asymmetry.
> I have thus been stuck for quite a long time in “Sr” purgatory.
The move beyond senior becomes almost entirely political. You have to play the game or you’ll be stuck there forever (or until interviewing into a higher role elsewhere). It’s all about doing the right things for the right people at the right time, with your name prominently attached.
Before introducing levels Netflix paid up to 550k in cash to people with the title of "senior software engineer". My title could be "dumbest person in the world" and I'd be happy with it if I were paid that much.
Why wouldn't you just put an appropriate level for the destination company on your resume? Or leave the level off altogether if "translating" the title is offensive to you somehow.
I always thought total comp and base salary would be the compensating signals for title inflation and lateral moves and all those transitions that aren't 1:1. Money is money after all.
So I really don't care about titles. But the problem is titles are really important as other companies care about them enough to withhold them!
The other thing is it is really hard to define "scope". With titles and hierarchies sadly all the scope below is attributes to you (and this reflects in the pay). You also hear a lot of making "impact". But seriously shipping a line of code (amidst 10s of millions) to a phone os update used by a billion users isn't that exciting to me. I care more about the % of attributable impact.
The funny part of this whole discussion is that it is all relative.
Titles are a made up thing. We assign an english word to label an employee, then make value judgements about it.
Is title inflation really a thing? OK then, how was the value of a title set in the first place? Is there some natural phenomena to measure what an 'executive' should be?
Businesses use title inflation selectively. If I want to toss a carrot that costs virtually nothing to someone, I can give a title promotion of sorts. To some labor, that's attractive because they see it as a way to grow their career: someone else at another company may value that title higher to improve my mobility to jump positions, whether or not I'm fully qualified already.
Meanwhile, when companies are hiring, they tend to ignore your previous titles and focus on evaluating things objectively. They're aware of title ambiguities because it's a charade they all play. They want to see your actual skillset, look at what you did in your previous role and assess that. During salary and role negotiations, they can use titles against you if they find your previous title wasn't inflated, even if they know you're actually more qualified than the title projects. It can be a way to rationalize lower pay bands or roles at another business. So companies tend to project value in titles when they give them away yet value them as worthless when it matters to them, meanwhile leverage titles any way they can to their advantage. It's an intangible commodity for manipulation.
It's almost beyond unreal. In the past two weeks I've had multiple discussions about promoting staff with 1-3 years of experience in this, their first job out of undergrad, into positions that have typically required 15-20 years of broad industry experience with various responsibilities or accomplishments (successful P&L management, regarding in their field, etc.).
My management has basically just shrugged, "it's the market right now" without considering any long-term ramifications. I'd almost be fine with it if the rising tide lifted all boats, but it seems to be highly particular to the incoming <5 years of experience people.
Before too long, I'm going to end up working for people who know almost nothing, and don't even have the experience to know it. That'll be the moment I retire.
One thing that you haven't touched on here (and most people don't) is that "professional experience" is highly nebulous in a field like software development where you may have a >10 year head start compared to your peers in terms of life stage.
I started programming when I was 8, and have been a contributor to many software projects from age 11 onwards, with a lot of those contributions still publicly visible on my GitHub profile. Straight out of college, sure I have "~1 year of experience" (that is, if you even count my internships) but I've been programming for more than half my life. If you sum my ad hoc experience contributing to FOSS projects, doing one-off contract work, personal projects, and just tinkering over 15 years I might very well be as good as someone with "15-20 years of broad industry experience", but it doesn't show on my resume as an easily quantified number. I've definitely come across and worked with these kinds of tenured, experienced workers who went into software development not as a hobby or interest but as a mere career and ended up falling behind in their later years due to a lack of drive.
This kind of thing is rare in most professions, so people aren't used to it (and I'm not saying that it's 100% what's happening in your anecdote), but I believe it is becoming increasingly common in software development.
Sorry, but I think it's you who are out of touch here.
Requiring 15-20 years of experience?
Just... no.
Software engineers are so well paid that many of them retire from the job market permanently after 15-20 years. You might as well ask people to be 65 years old until they can occupy the position.
20 years is 25% of a lifespan, and 33% of an adult lifespan.
Why isn't 10 years good enough? Unless it's an executive position for people who are at the end of their careers. You can become a Brigadier General in 20 years in the military, which would be broadly equivalent to a SVP.
Yeah this is a weird mentality that I encounter pretty often.
It is completely juxtaposed with the reality of most senior managers, who are identified by companies in their early 20s. Companies tend to promote high velocity career climbers and want to promote them young in order to get plenty of years of service from them.
I don't see title inflation being too big an issue at large companies. At my megacorp we have fairly well defined expectations at each level and managers calibrate across teams. It's basically:
- junior, fresh out of school and is basically expected to do whatever task they are told to
- mid, a few years in and can define their own work within a project
- senior (many stop here), can manage their own projects, but limited influence outside the team. Expected to mentor juniors and work with partners
- staff, a lot less coding, lots of digital ink spilled recently on what staff engineers do :) basically influence the entire team and help set technical direction
- principal, basically a mega staff engineer, influences a larger organization. Called in to solve the hairiest problems.
It reminds me of Newspeak, from Orwell's 1984. Leaders, especially of bureaucracies, perennially hope to shape belief by just renaming things.
I've been to Wal-Mart or Target or any number of places, where I have read a sign or overheard a prerecorded announcement referring to the workers as "team members", "associates", "specialists", "customer advocates", and so on. The illusion dissipates instantaneously. I immediately see it as pretentious, and the reflex is to cringe. I suspect that most employees roll their eyes at it too.
I don't believe that the executives who came up with these fancy names are fooled by them either --- and that's part of the problem, it's condescending. The executive thinks, "I see right through these words, into the real thing, but my employees and customers are stupider than me, and I believe these names can sway their thinking."
Another problem is that it is just like inflation, in that it doesn't stop spiraling upward. I believe that the word "employee" was once a fancy replacement for something plainer, like "worker". But H.R. told me, when I was making an app for them, that it's a dirty word: We don't "employ" people. That makes it sound like we are using them. (Well, you are, but they know you are, and after all you are paying them. It was all agreed upon at the outset. Also it's not so bad. Everyone wants, in the end, to be "useful".) But no, now they are called "associates". It won't end. There is even a chance that it will go in circles. I would not be surprised if some years later, a new executive arrives, says "associate" is too loose: "They aren't merely associated with us in some tangential way. We need them and employ them for our success. Let us call them 'employees'."
I don't think the intent is to deceive anyone. The actual intent is that calling employees a team or even family subtly tries to add some strings to the job. It might be okay to leave a job for slightly better pay, but you would not leave your family. A team would not let the store close on the weekend because they are low on personnel, you are "in this together", after all. Sure, it's a quite obvious ploy if you look at it, but using that kind of language does affect people.
I've noticed this a few months ago where I live (Romania), namely, that we've used to go to the "Dentist", which is an actual Romanian word, but now the town where I live is full of "Dental Spas" and "Dental Studios". Yes, we're using English terminology, even though that's not the official language here.
I think "sandwich artist" for Subway is one that is condescending.
That being said I think most people still probably prefer this to the alternative. Being called a "associate" instead of "cashier" is still slightly more respectable to tell your friends/families. It also probably stresses to employees that their job is to represent the entire store - not just do a a task without regard for the customer experience.
A friend of mine, who works at Amazon as a principal engineer, also mentioned that Amazon had been inflating title too. Per his words, Sr. SDE in Amazon used to be a big deal. People usually got such title after > 10 years of grinding, and they would be happy to stay in that title forever. Principal engineers were treated like demigods. There was even a page on Amazon wiki that cautioned new principal engineers not to think of themselves so. But now engineers expected to get promoted to principal in three years after being promoted to L6. An L6 engineers could be promoted to L7 if they could launch a product.
As a young engineer, I expect to get promoted quickly because that's what I see happening pretty commonly for other people. The kicker is that most people who get these titles quickly don't even seem to be exceptional. It's pure inflation.
It's likely I'll end up with the title of Senior with ~3 YOE at a big tech co. I think it's extremely dumb and feel like Senior and sometimes Staff titles are often undeserved, but it feels like if you don't play along you're just falling behind.
We need to have some kind of standard in the industry. It's just like how here in Canada we have the plague of regulatory bodies given the legal right to make it illegal to call yourself "Software Engineer" as a protected term unless you have a B.Eng. and spend 3 years in gov't controlled training programs. What a joke. What we really need to do is set up some fucking standards so that braindead developers can't cheese their way into industry and get promoted to "Senior Developer" by writing mediocre, barely functional JavaScript code among other monkey-brained developers writing barely functional code of a similar caliber. It's becoming an epidemic of self-taught bootcamp idiots who're destroying the industry and decimating uptime and availability which competent developers are then required to fix on-call, and I'm tired of pretending it's not.
So on the one hand you’re complaining about regulatory bodies keeping standards for job titles. But on the other you’re gatekeeping the industry against people who don’t have traditional education. Surely the problem isn’t bootcamp grads, but rather the companies that would let an incompetent engineer get promoted to senior in the first place.
I do agree that keeping preventing Canadian developers from calling themselves engineers is a joke (let’s see them try and stop me)
It's not just this industry though, it's lots of industries.
"Communications director" is something you have to fucking decipher with a code you get on the back of your Froot Loops box, because it means one thing at one company and something radically different at another. Just to give an example. Reading somebody's resume can be hell.
But it now is an established convention. When you hear "VP at a bank", for the last 50 years it has been common knowledge that it is an individual contributor with 4-8ish years of experience, and when you hear "Managing Director", you translate it to "10yr+ experience and some people under him".
Whereas in software, you don't really know how much authority a "senior architect" or "engineering fellow" or "principal staff developer" really has...
Acadamia often makes up inflated titles for themselves in several ways. A professor starts an "institute" which is just a banner slapped on their work, and now they are the "Director of the Institute for the Study of...". Or they get a donation from some rich person and they add the rich persons name as a title, as in "I. Am Important, the Dovey and Sam Pekinpaw professor of Engineering". Or they join a group of their colloborators and give out awards to themselves and add the award names to their titles as in "I. Also Important, the International Superior Professor". Or they give their group of grad students and their workspace a name as in "Aint I. Great, Director of the Great Research Lab". Many of them collect multiple such titles which can make their titles go on to fill a large paragraph. Some of the titles have merit, some are selling their name to get donations, some are entirely made up.
You can do the same. Take your side project, call it a company, and now you are CEO of that company. You don't even need to incorporate the company or give info about it (you are in "stealth mode").
The article doesn't seem to make a very strong case for the severity of this "scourge". Just like grades or degrees mean little without knowing about the school they came from, job titles, especially their implied seniority, don't mean much without knowledge of the company. Is this a problem worth worrying about, or just a fun rant?
Personally, I take it seriously and I think that we at least have the opportunity to make our concerns known here as well.
To boil down my job title would reduce me to a computer programmer. I'm fine with that and it's what I tell to people I meet. In the industry though, it's another story, because we have to play the game in order to succeed. The result of this is that everyone on my team is a senior software person, while I reside in North America, and them, all overseas. You can imagine the pay-gap.
So where does this put me as the more experienced person on the team, getting paid double the salary of those who share the same job title? As the organization expands and goes through its cost cutting phases, I imagine that spot is directly in the sights of, well a coat saving opportunity. Am I paranoid? Maybe.
I never learn anything meaningful from articles titled "the [growth/rise/fall/death/scourge/epidemic] of [a thing that happens on Twitter/in California]".
This has become a pretty prickly issue that I’ve seen in mergers where one company has title inflation and the other doesn’t.
What’s perverse is that while having an inflated title may be a benefit with regards to external lateral employment, it’s a huge detriment to internal advancement as employees with inflated titles aren’t qualified for roles their title might imply, but aren’t considered for what could actually be career advancing roles as they’re considered too “senior” on a title basis
One of the pieces of advice I received from the founder of a startup I once worked for is that you don't give out C-level titles at a young company other than what is legally required (i.e. a CEO). The reason is that when you likely get acquired there isn't a massive shock for those C-level employees since they're almost certainly not getting a C-suite position at the acquiring organization.
Instead, all of the startup execs had VP titles. When we got acquired by a large corporation, many of them went down to Senior Manager titles, a few being able to get Director titles. I suppose a cynic might argue this is actually about the ego of the startup CEO, but after seeing it in action I believe it was good advice and have used it in my own startup.
I’m more concerned with skillset deflation. It’s super common to run in to people with 10 years experience, a nice resume, and an impressive title that can’t do much of anything.
I think this happens because employers are expecting too much from their employees nowadays, where everyone needs to bounce around 10 flavor-of-the-month languages/frameworks, so you never master anything, and later turns into code smell. The better path to more skilled individuals is going back to the "training for the role" days, and sticking to what works to just deliver a solid product.
There is a some amount of useless churn, but it's also the case that things are getting better, so that being decent at the current thing can be more productive and useful than being a master of the old.
> fulfilling to tackle a new project and a new tech stack every 18 months.
That's not what I mean by 1 year of experience 10 times. That's 1 year of experience with specific technologies, which nobody except recruiters and HR people looking to mindless fill out a job description care about.
By 1 year of experience 10 times, I mean working in the same ecosystem, doing coding but never really going beyond that. It seems like there's always someone in every position I've had. They have a long resume, but look at their code or their overall development practices and you'd think it came from a junior coder new to the industry.
Establishing yourself through learning a new tech stack every so often is fine – as long as you demonstrate that your skills as a developer have grown. Going from not owning any specific area of the code, helping in other people’s areas, fixing bugs, making small modifications, and implementing very small features to owning an entire product, in all aspects of the development process, providing technical direction to others, doing design and making architectural-level decisions is establishing yourself.
I've just found the idea of "1 year of experience repeated 10 times" at a dissonance with an industry very much oriented around staffing individual projects.
I agree, as long as you're building those skills of ownership, that's progression. I've just had many say you need to stay at a place 5 years to do that, which is crazy to me.
Oh no, it's definitely ok to move around and change technologies. In fact, it's probably an advantage to know 1-2 really deeply but have familiarity with more.
Another way to look at it, is that it's a local maximum. You're right that it is high-paying and fulfilling to keep learning new things. And I felt pretty down about myself for a while because I was pretty focused on some things that seem lame on HN (FORTRAN, Old-school C++, etc.). But in the last few years my career has matured and now I feel more secure in my 26 years of experience in a pretty narrow field. I really do have lots of fun and fulfillment at work solving hard problems, but to get here I needed the dedicated experience to have enough context to be efficient at what I do.
I guess, what I'm saying, is just be careful not to get stuck in an ADHD local maximum where you're getting a dopamine hit for jumping to the next new thing. Sometimes taking the time to become a real expert in something can pay off on a longer time scale.
*I'm not saying that it's bad to have 1 year of experience n times, you're probably pretty good at getting up to speed - you have n years of experience of learning new things, and that is also valuable in many contexts. I'm just saying that it can be a local maximum.
> I guess, what I'm saying, is just be careful not to get stuck in an ADHD local maximum where you're getting a dopamine hit for jumping to the next new thing. Sometimes taking the time to become a real expert in something can pay off on a longer time scale.
> I'm not saying that it's bad to have 1 year of experience n times, you're probably pretty good at getting up to speed - you have n years of experience of learning new things, and that is also valuable in many contexts. I'm just saying that it can be a local maximum.
That's a really great way to phrase it, thank you.
It's definitely like that now I think about it... although I do see many engineers get caught working in bad environments because they choose too early.
I would also that the benefit is not only better pay, but also being able to onboard efficiently and working with varying styles of orgs and people. If you work at a single place for a very long time, you get used to the way people work, think, approach problems. It's really nice to see how 'others' do it, what 'others' think, validate what you know and do.
I think it's in "Managing the professional service firm" by Maister that he talks about giving people various titles so they can't really compare themselves within a firm. Famously (maybe) there is a scene in The Office where Dwight and Andy square off as Assistant Regional Manager and Managing Director in charge of sales, and each thinks their title places them above the other. There's an element of this in the article, which I think is different than the Walmart Associate / Metamate thing which I think is somehow meant to instill comaraderie. And then there is the actual inflation - "lead" is the new one I see. Are you a lead or the lead. Nowadays it's almost always the former, and it means you have about two years experience, like most current uses of senior
I think your wording could confuse people. I am a lead in the context of my company, as there are a few different leads. But each of us is the only lead of our own team.
So if you asked me, I’d probably say “I’m one of our leads”, because the company has several teams which serve different functions. But I am the singular tech lead of my team.
Had no idea that a team would have multiple leads, wouldn’t have even crossed my mind to disambiguate that for you, and I’m guessing that same confusion has happened with others
Having multiple people on the same team with "lead" in their title, with no clear definition of what they are leading, is in fact a phenomenon I have seen in practice. I am aware of one major company that simply promotes everybody from "senior software developer" to "lead software developer" at a certain point, with no regard for how many people have that title on each team. In practice, the lead position seems to be more like what is called senior in other companies.
While I agree with your point in general, the "manager" in the title doesn't necessarily refer to managing people. e.g. a "social media manager" only needs to manage the function.
In my opinion titles should be for communicating your approximate skill/experience level to people inside and outside the company who already don't know you.
But this falls down when I, with over 20 years of actual work experience, am a "Senior Server Engineer" and I talk with a "Principal Server Engineer" from India who has problems logging in to AWS and checking CloudWatch logs.
Titles shouldn't be a reward used instead of pay rises or just for being in the company long enough. You shouldn't become Principal Software Architect just by being in the same job for a decade.
I switched jobs recently and took a step down in title. My pay increased and the team dynamic and management is decidedly less toxic than my previous job, so... win overall!
Job title inflation is an inverse function of compensation and inequality. When a few people are getting paid a ton of money and you are not being paid much, getting a "promotion" is one of the few ways to land a highly paid position. If your current company gives you more responsibility without increasing your pay, you can usually switch jobs for a higher salary.
Fun fact: one of the accused in the fraud scandal around Wirecard claims that he had no important role in the company, as evidenced by his „fantasy title“: Deputy CFO.
At one company we had a policy that you could have any title you want but it had to reflect your work and not provoke mockery. The example of the latter was "Sure, you can have cards that read 'Software Wizard' but what will happen if you show that card to a colleague?" There was only one person whom everybody else agreed was a true software wizard and that person just wanted the title "Programmer" -- actually they didn't want cards at all.
One wag said he wanted the title CFO. We said that would be OK but he'd have to actually do the job, including taking on the liability. He decided to pick something else.
The main purpose for titles was so that when you talked to someone outside the company they'd know who they were talking to "Oh, a VP. This person can sign my contract" or "Oh, a VP. THis is a waste of time; I need to talk to a developer"
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OTOH I have worked in an industry where titles are super important: pharma. That's because you can get a job on a drug program that's already been under way for a few years, work on it for several years, and then move on with it still not approced. The NDAs are actually observed in that industry so you can't talk about your work. So the fact that you had a continuous rise to senior associate director showed that you had been at least valued by your employer.
IT has to be Computer Necromancer, surely? Their job is to resurrect dead systems. I mean you go to IT complaining about a miscreant computer and the very first thing they'll do is tell you to kill the thing then raise it from the grave.
Maybe on the Windows side, the natural state of a Windows PC is a sort of operating, but decayed; in a state of partial death. Somehow kept from passing beyond by presumably unnatural forces.
This is already a rampant issue in software engineering and means that there's an enormous gamut of what "Sr. Software Engineer" means between someone who knows how to "code" and someone who can solve large technical problems at an organizational level.
That was something that could have done with analysis rather than a very short article pointing out that its a thing. I'd be interested to know if it really is a thing. For all I know this has always happened and the language around these titles are just a little different.
This was a headache for me when I had teams reporting to me from Mumbai. I had to create artificial layers of job titles that didn't exist in any of our other regions because there was an expectation of moving up on a regular cadence.
On one hand it rubbed me the wrong way personally, but that's not a big deal and something I could get over, but on the other hand I was regularly having to explain to team members in other regions why promotions in Mumbai were happening so much faster than everywhere else. It was a people and perception problem, but still had people who couldn't let it go.
I absolutely abhor job titles, but in the corporate world, especially when seeking new employment and building that buzzword-laden resume, it's an unfortunate reality.
If you could specify, model, design, build, document, promote, test and verify a solution—-whether that was in software or any other field—-then you were an “engineer” in the sense that the title was used in the 20th century.
In the 21st century, the term “engineer” has lost that meaning and it is now used mostly to identify programming professionals of various skill levels.
These aren't bullshit jobs, or at least the two on mostly unrelated. These are "real" jobs that need title inflation because title is cheaper than cash. The article uses the example of building receptionists.
Receptionist may or may not be strictly necessary for any particular building, of course, but it's indisputable that a building receptionist is a real job. Eg a large office or residential building where you have a large number of people coming and going throughout the day. Part security guard, part front office mail clerk, part janitor, part concierge. More than enough random little tasks that are difficult enough to automate in the edge cases.
The article also mentions "Sanitation technicians", which are about as far from a bullshit job as you can get... someone has to clean the shit.
There is notable overlap between bullshit jobs and inflated titles though. Poke around any large corp and you'll find plenty of "Global Head of Value Engineering Strategy" types, often 'heading' a team of 1, namely themselves.
Hence "reminds me". Indeed they aren't the same, but I disagree that they're unrelated. I'd recommend getting past the article and book titles to understand how these jobs come to be in the first place.
This is absolutely true. If someone is advertising for a VP of software engineering but asking for a skill set that matches mine, I conclude that they don’t know what they’re doing.
I work in a smallish company (around 150 employees I believe) and we recently went through this career framework development and standardisation and as part of that we came up with standard levels and titles across the company but we had to make an exception for our USA office. They would all still have the standard titles internally for pay bands, career progression etc but because of customer expectations, everyone had to be a VP of this or Senior VP of that where VP elsewhere in the company was a very senior position. Kinda funny really.
My first job out of college had 3 basic titles that broke down into
- New grad, takes more than give
- Individual contributor
- Team technical lead
I really liked it as it was clear what the roles where and how to move up. We kept running into problems with people wanting smaller career milestones. Unsure if it was due to smaller milestones from college, gamification, or what.
Since that company switched titles to match industry and at each job since, job titles have been a mystery to me.
I just left a project where I architected the system and managed multiple dev teams for two years. The manager who replaced me is doing maintenance and updates with a pared-down team, yet took "principal software architect" as his job title -- which is definitely a loftier title than I took.
Maybe I need to ask my boss for a "title raise" ;)
Years ago I realized titles mean nothing these days. Everyone new hire out of school where I work is hired as a "senior programmer".
About the only thing that does not happen is a significant pay increase, but the titles with promotion keep getting more grandiose, pay, maybe a 0.5% increase if any.
I think that a lot of the problem is that programmers are treated like expendable cogs to be run as fast as possible until they burn out and are replaced. So people desperately race up the title ladder in an attempt to get to the point where they aren't treated like crap.
This is a rant in search of a problem to solve. It doesn’t make a strong case for a “scourge”. The issues it points out have less to do with title inflation and more to do with bad leadership, planning, and comms.
There are people who join to chess tournaments in small countries, just to obtain the GM or IM titles. Those titles are hard to obtain in bigger tournaments. Not the same thing, but they belong to the same cluster.
when i was 16, i held a position at now defunct Kmart, which i candidly referred to as 'Stock Logistics Technician"
yes, i was a stock-boy. i suppose i was part of the problem from an early age.
on topic - my only real complaints about title inflation are 2 fold: first, interview screens; second, annimosity generated within departments between engineers holding the perception they "are better" than x yet x has a "higher" title. both are frustrating situations
I learned a while ago to ground the seniority conversation in comp. Titles are whatever, how much you are willing to pay me is a better indicator of the scope and impact you expect.
I still remember a team member some years who was promoted to "Principal SW Eng" - when titles were still a little bit of "something". And then he added: yeah, but no raise. And we both laughed, because clearly it was ridiculous what they had done to keep him.
In bay area big tech, eng titles are tied to levels and if you don't move up then you're let go. Naturally people work hard to level up, which also comes with a new title.
I get this a lot. On paper, I'm a technical director of software development. This sounds like I'm a manager, but in practice I'm a senior software engineer.
When I was hired to work for a bank, the offer had a title of “Vice President.” I almost turned it down because I was worried that they were offering me a management role.
Why not? Severance is all about signing away your rights to sue for discrimination or misconduct in exchange for some token. It's all negotiable - I don't see why they wouldn't grant you a silly title in future reference checks, especially if you go as far as to refuse the cash payment.
When I encounter the term "engineer", I take it to mean someone who, if they screw up, people die.
I know a "Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer" is a thing that exists, but it seems to me rather a contradiction in terms, suggestive as it is of an engineer who is expected or even required to make mistakes.
There's (I think) a difference between an "engineer" (someone with a degree in their field, say) and a Professional Engineer (aka a Chartered Engineer), someone who is responsible for serious fuckups.
I feel like this is a bit of a dramatization - but most 'real' engineers work on on physical products with lead times and manufacturing costs.
You could design, manufacture, and ship thousands of gadgets which turn out to be scarp, because someone forgot to place a pull-up resistor for the reset pin leaving the devices unable to boot up (definitely not a real example :) )
You can make costly mistakes with software too, but in old engineering it's the norm not the exception.
They are not engineers and need to stop using that term. A PE is absolutely culpable if their design or the project they are managing leads to injury and loss of life.
This is untrue in the us. You need to be a certified PE to sign certain documents and if you misrepresent yourself in that situation, you might be criminally liable, and certainly financially so, but no anyone can call themselves a PE or an engineer thanks to the first amendment (for recent relevant caselaw: https://ij.org/press-release/oregon-engineer-wins-traffic-li...).
You are incorrect. The judge's ruling is exceedingly narrow and does not qualify Mats to call himself an engineer in any area other than publicly commenting on traffic light timing. Mats cannot call himself an engineer for the purposes of any other subject, including electrical enginnering, for which he is trained, until he acquires the PE designation.
This is incorrect. He cannot call himself a PE for the purposes of acquiring clients (that's fraud), but he's perfectly free to call himself an engineer otherwise, per the actual ruling and not a press release by a biased party.
You are correct that the ruling partially constrains itself to traffic lights, but that is because that's all Jarlstrom asked for, and this was a preliminary injunction, it didn't even go to trial!
That said, the ruling also makes clear that the Oregon engineering title laws (as opposed to engineering practice laws) "violate the first amendment on their face". And if those statutes are unconstitutional, there's no law for Jarlstrom to violate. And as such, it states " Plaintiff Järlström may describe himself publicly and privately using the
word “engineer." And that Oregon cannot enforce any of the professional engineering registration act against him for doing so.
And Oregon is one of only a few states with such a law, so in most of the US there isn't even a law to strike down, it's just clearly legal.
Sure 'professional engineer' and 'licensed engineer' are protected. Just 'engineer' isn't in the US, unless you're in Texas. Even still, I thought Texas lets people be business card engineers.
That was a kind of circa 1980s/mindset 1990s thing. Mostly ceased being the case in much the same way that "Crypto" no longer refers exclusively to cryptography, and often to cryptographic currency.
Sofware Engineers (and their recent extensions, Sight Reliability Engineers, Data Engineers), etc... have been a pretty common concept for 20+ years.
I'm not sure I quite so literally agree with your wording, but I do share the sentiment. I'm not fond of calling myself an engineer as I find it rather big-headed. Most of us are just programmers, very little - if any - engineering gets done, and there's no standard certification either.
Or maybe I have a rosy view of what "actual" engineers do.
I don't love having an Engineer title but it's the reality of the workplace in the US at least. Software Engineer and related are very, very common. Now even some colleges and universities have degrees in Software Engineering.
"Software Engineer" is pretty much a literal description of the job. What these threads always miss is the definition of the word engineering[1]:
> The application of mathematics and the physical sciences to the needs of humanity and the development of technology
The Wikipedia article for Engineer[2] further drives it home:
> The work of engineers forms the link between scientific discoveries and their subsequent applications to human and business needs and quality of life.
And that's what I do: I take the field I studied (Computer Science) and I apply the knowledge and discoveries of that field¹ towards the needs of humanity, i.e., I engineer. (Typically, and it is somewhat expected, I engineer software. Not always, ofc.)
People get hung up on that "PE" is a specific term of art in some jurisdictions and some fields, with a correspondingly more narrow definition.
The usage may have changed over time which can definitely be irritating but I think "engineer" is a useful word to mean roughly someone who applies some sort of theoretical knowledge to solve practical problems. E.g. financial engineering. If you have a better word for this let me know. I wouldn't mind the term "computer programmer" but no one uses that as a title. "Developer" just sounds dumb.
The job titles seem to say more about the people hiring than about the jobs themselves.
I have often thought that making software has at least as much in common with cooking or sewing as it does with engineering or architecture, as in "software architect" or "software engineer"- yet there are no software chefs or software tailors.
Perhaps executives are uncomfortable knowing less about a fundamental aspect of their business than a chef or a tailor but if an engineer or architect knows something they don't, well, those are demanding disciplines that the executive can be forgiven not having mastered. Likewise there are no attire engineers or food architects because we might be more reluctant to have our waistline measured by an engineer or to tell an architect in fine detail how our meal should be prepared.
It also occurs to me that both architecture and engineering are traditionally male-dominated fields. On the other hand, "computing" was originally considered woman's work[0]. Whatever title I propose is ultimately moot if the people hiring would rather call their employees software architect, software engineer, software lumberjack, etc. However, since you asked me, I think "codewright" has a ring to it.[1]
> yet there are no software chefs or software tailors.
Actually.... Chef is a configuration management tool that uses system configuration "recipes". [1] [2]
There are tailored systems in software. We call those bespoke systems. [3]
Bespoke software – sometimes called custom software or tailored
software – is a software solution created for a specific user.
Much like a bespoke suit, these software solutions are made and
tailored entirely to your exact specifications.
> However, since you asked me, I think "codewright" has a ring to it.
CodeWright is a Windows Programmers Editing System for software developers originally marketed by Premia Corp. [4] Though, enough time has passed that you should be able to safely reuse that title!
Contextually the word Professor means different things in the US to almost anywhere else. In the UK and Australia it means a senior academic who can be head of department, occupies a "chair" which may be personal or functional, and who has moved beyond the pedestrian state of teaching to a more exalted level we call "many fine dinners"
In America, it appears to mean "is paid to teach"
"Dean" might work. Dean of cleaning. Dean of Catering.
This wouldn't just be the US. In Spanish-speaking countries (though technically America as in North/Central/South America), "profesor" can refer to either a high school educator or a university professor: https://www.spanishdict.com/translate/profesor
I would be glad to hear more from native Spanish speakers or other foreign language speakers who use similar terms (e.g. French speakers, who also use the word "professeur" with a similar usage).
Same in Polish. But, in the higher education context, "professor" is the highest job title there is (it's even given by the country's president during an official ceremony, although there's also "university professor" title, which doesn't involve the president), requiring usually at least 15-year academic career.
That seems like an oversimplification of American usage. It certainly doesn’t refer to a K12 teacher, and many people distinguish between adjuncts/instructors and tenure-track professors.
Technically though, one is not a professor until reaching the rank of “full professor”, which typically happens no younger than 40, after being promoted from “assistant professor” to “associate professor” (and then coming up for full several years later).
Assistant professors will say “I am a professor” when asked what they do for a living. But when being introduced at academic conferences they would normally be referred to as “an assistant/associate professor at university X”.
Some of this is inside baseball among academics, but the first paragraph applies pretty widely.
You didn't use the words Lecturer or Senior Lecturer there at all. They're terms used in the UK, Australia and New Zealand. There's another fine British/Imperial academic title: Reader. I never quite worked out what it meant. Most of the professors told me it meant "not to be trusted" but they would say that.
Emeritus and Adjunct are a bit like "executive producer" in "State and Maine" grace-titles handed out to keep people happy. Emeritus get use of a room and access to the coffee machine.
> There's another fine British/Imperial academic title: Reader. I never quite worked out what it meant.
Well, you see, words "lecturer" and "reader" both have the same meaning, but the former is a fancy French/Latin word and the latter is a boorish English one, so I'd imagine the difference between the academic titles would be about of the same level.
I'm not sure Senior Lecturer exists much in the US. Lecturer is like adjunct/instructor, in my experience.
Is emeritus and adjunct the same thing in those countries? In the US, the former is a semi-retired (tenured) professor, and the latter is not on the tenure track at all.
Yes. Emeritus is ex tenure. hence the room. Adjunct is given out as grace-and-favour to corporate types who are helpful. Hmm. Nobody offered it to me. Well, maybe I'm less helpful than I think.
Adjunct in the US is usually given to non-tenure track phds, who teach on a temp (usually per credit) basis. They're basically lecturers but worse off, since lecturers are often full time (and sometimes need not have phds!)
The Economist complaining about people having fancy job titles despite not doing the work is rich coming from the boot-lickiest of the capitalist bootlickers.
