[lotharbot]

a couple decades back, when my dad was working for one of the big telecom companies, they invented a new job title specifically so they could promote him with the appropriate pay bump while also keeping him coding instead of managing. (They later hired/promoted others with the same title.)

I thought it was a great solution. If a dinosaur like a telecom company can do it, why can't others?

[magicalist]

Yeah, this is a fairly common compromise, and even helps in the stupid cases where you can't give person A a job title higher than person B who will be mortified if they don't have the best sounding job title, but you still need to give person A a raise and a feeling of advancement (so glad I don't work at a place like this anymore). So you give them some variation on their current job title (it's not a promotion over you, person B!) and a raise, and call it a day.

It depends on how effectively bureaucratic the bureaucracy is. If all workers have to have a job title that's already in the database, and all job titles have an assigned salary, then you're out of luck.

[harmegido]

This has been extremely fascinating reading about job titles. I'll never understand why people care about them.

[seestheday]

You should care about them. They facilitate movement in between companies. If you're a "manager" at a major organization but are actually doing VP level work and are getting paid like a VP, it will be very difficult for you to convince another company that they should hire you as a VP. You'll also get lots of cold calls from recruiters about jobs that you are severely overqualified for.