[throwaway7808]

AFAIK "chief scientist" title assumes that you, or your team of scientists are doing academic research. And that you publish results of your research.

Taking a title like that, while actually not doing it is a borderline fraud. If I'll get a resume with "scientist" or "researcher" in the title, the first thing I would look at would be published academic papers. If there are none, I will not consider this resume.

[mattzito]

Well, the origins were far more benign than "borderline fraud" - my original role was doing product research in distributed database design and performance. I gave a lot of talks and wrote a couple of (non-acaddemic) papers on how to build widely distributed database systems, focusing on Oracle RAC.

My job evolved to be more of a business-focused role, but my title did not. The intention was never to mislead, and indeed, when asked, I never claimed to be an academic.

> Taking a title like that, while actually not doing it is a borderline fraud

That seems like a strong conclusion to draw. My title now is "Product Architect", but I'm not an architect, nor do I exclusively design products.

A quick skim through Crunchbase yields:

http://www.crunchbase.com/person/jeff-hammerbacher (bright guy, not an academic)

http://www.crunchbase.com/person/bram-cohen (not an academic)

http://www.crunchbase.com/person/chris-slowe (not really an academic)

And that's in the first 10 results. "Fraud" seems strong.