[santacluster]

Job title has in my experience strongly affected my ability to influence entrenched company and engineering cultures.

Titles affect how you are perceived by others, including engineers, no matter how often we like the repeat the "but we're a meritocracy" BS. People don't work that way, not even engineers. There are a lot more variables that go into how we perceive and treat people than just their technical output.

So the question "how will my job title affect my ability to do X?" is a perfectly valid one, and meritocracy buzzword bingo is not a valid answer.

[maxsilver]

Exactly.

Has the author never worked for a different employer? It's very common in a lot of companies for developers to be excluded from (hearing about / learning about / have input on) something, simply because they don't have (specific job title). That's a legitimate concern. Even tiny 10-ish person companies often fall into this trap.

The companies that promise candidates not to worry about job titles because "we're a flat organization", "we're agile", "we're a meritocracy" tend to fall into this trap even more than the older ones do -- knowing and using the right buzzwords is almost a red flag in itself.

So, completely hypothetically, these are all problems that would be bad and should be avoided, as the author writes.

But in practice, it sounds like a candidate was concerned about making sure they'd have enough authority to actually make improvements and not just shoved onto busywork at random.

And instead of addressing that concern in any meaningful way, the company took that as an opportunity to respond with a bunch of buzzwords and ad-hominems, and then pat themselves on the back about it.

[jonnathanson]

It's been my experience that people who are quickest to say "Titles don't matter here" are the ones with the nicest titles. :)

In fairness, I don't think most founders set out to create political organizations. (Politics is more of an emergent phenomenon -- a "god of the gaps" that arises to fill informational voids and power vacuums.) But saying titles don't matter is either being very naive, or being intentionally misleading. Naive: when someone high up in an organization (a founder or VP, say) isn't aware of the extent to which titles matter, because his title has ensured that people always listen to him. Misleading: when a boss or hiring manager tells a prospective employee that titles don't matter, in order to get that employee to accept a title below his expectations.

That having been said, I do occasionally encounter the "Entitled" anti-pattern the blog post talks about. You see it in employees who feel marginalized. Sometimes you see it in new employees, especially those who have recently come from a much bigger organization, and who are used to formalized hierarchies. Sometimes you see it because your organization really does care a great deal about title, and you've been blinded to the extent to which it does. In any of these cases, I tend to think the burden is on the organization/boss to try to understand the source of any title hangups. Sure, some people are just wildly insecure, and they'll never be content with any given title. I tend to think these people are the minority of most "Entitled" scenarios. And at any rate, it's more productive to assume that the person feels marginalized in some way, and to attempt to diagnose why -- rather than to blame his fundamental psychology.

[mabbo]

For sake of argument, have you considered selection bias or cause/effect reversal as another explanation?

What I mean is, perhaps the people who are able to clearly and concisely explain their ideas are the ones who are most likely to become senior engineers, managers, etc? As they proficiently share their ideas, they tend to have a lot of influence, which in turn leads to them getting promotions. Communication and interpersonal skills are a huge part of being a good engineer working on a team.

There was a guy I worked with when I was a new grad, let's call him Bill. Bill himself was also pretty fresh, had a few years under his belt maybe. But Bill can communicate with a level of clarity that I am still in awe of. Of course he became a senior engineer while he was very still fairly young, and of course he has a lot of influence. The technical skills to become a Senior Engineer are only half of the equation.

I say this all as a (non-senior) engineer who finds he often has a hard time with communication and interpersonal skills. I'm growing technically, but I've got to work way harder to grow those soft skills at the same rate.

[klagermkii]

Absolutely. Maybe this can work if you only work around other engineers who are able to (somewhat) accurately judge the quality of your work and opinions based on their own knowledge. As soon as you're dealing with other departments or clients who do not have the ability to correctly judge your competence they latch on to other methods of ranking you, which will be word of mouth, and failing that, title.

[Bahamut]

I have a similar experience, although so far it is only with one company so far. The company claimed to be flat, but it ended up being the loudest/most obstinate that ended up influencing the technical decisions.

I prefer more structure now to avoid running into that sort of situation.

[samastur]

I agree.

Another way of looking at it is if title is not defining scope of something, then what is its purpose?

[radmuzom]

It's purpose is to keep wages low. One might be so good that their ideas and subsequent execution is better than the "lead" or "chief" engineer, but the same person will be paid much lesser because of their title.

[nissimk]

In a similar context, title is often used by management as something that incurs little or zero cost to give to employees to make them feel better.

Beware of "I didn't get (much of) a raise but I got a promotion"