[brian_cunnie]

Measuring oneself as an engineer by the title of the salary band you're in is a disservice.

I remember at Bell Labs they had one title: MTS (Member of Technical Staff). You were an engineer, and that was that. (disclaimer: there were a handful of DMTSes (Distinguished Member of Technical Staff)).

No one said, "I'm an E7" or "I'm a Staff Engineer II". Those statements strike me as distasteful. And begs the question if we're being suckered by Human Resource's gamification of work.

I worked at a company, Pivotal Labs, where everyone's title was "Pivot". It made for an egalitarian workplace. That changed after the acquisition, and we got titles. My proudest moment? Not when I was promoted from Senior Engineer to Staff Engineer, but rather the after-hours work I did with Dimtriy to expand our offering to include IPv6.

At my current startup, there are no titles, and I'm grateful for that.

[thisoneisreal]

I had the pleasure of working with a handful of Pivots for about 2 years, and I have to say that felt like the closest I ever got to a healthy engineering culture. Delightful people, superb engineers, always focused on working and learning together. I feel really privileged to have worked in that environment.

[cortesoft]

For the first 10 years or so of my career, I didn’t even know my job title. I knew my pay, which is what I cared (and still care) about. They could call me the janitor as long as they paid me a good salary and the work didn’t change.

It wasn’t until one of my startups was bought by a big corp that I came to learn my job title, because suddenly it was tied to compensation. That mattered.

[chermi]

But you still had different pay, no? Seems like a clever way to make people less likely to complain about incentive package

[almostgotcaught]

> Measuring oneself as an engineer by the title of the salary band you're in is a disservice.

It's really not that deep - people do this because both a title and salary are effectively money you can bank and that's the only thing that matters - we don't work grueling, stressful, tedious, jobs just the sake of "a hard day's work".

> Not when I was promoted from Senior Engineer to Staff Engineer, but rather the after-hours work I did with Dimtriy to expand our offering to include IPv6.

I wish people would introspect more deeply instead of perpetuating toxic relationships with corporations; you're basically saying your most gratifying experience at work (where you are given a small slice of the net on your labor) was when you did something completely abstract and not when you got more money, more status, more whatever? Ok that's like saying my most gratifying experience at school was not when I graduated but when I had to sit in detention. Note I could've said "when I discovered XYZ mathematical principle" but I didn't because they're both equally as arbitrary in the overall scheme (learn skills and move into the workforce).

[dmoy]

> are effectively money you can bank and that's the only thing that matters

We may have to agree to disagree here.

Not even just talking about the case where someone's worked in the tech industry long enough with a low enough expense lifestyle that money literally does not matter to them anymore...

A lot of people will work specific jobs not because they're trying to optimize for the most possible money.

[AlotOfReading]

You're coming at the employer relationship from a fundamentally different place than the parent comment you're responding to.

I'm assuming their age because of when Pivotal Labs was a thing, but there was a period from about the late 90s to the early 2010s where many people in the valley believed in an ideal of ascetic tech monks where we did this for the love of the work and not purely for status or money. It's not like those elements were ever wholly absent, but nominally egalitarian hierarchies weren't the weirdest things in hindsight.

[Nevermark]

> Note I could've said "when I discovered XYZ mathematical principle" but I didn't because they're both equally as arbitrary

Wow. I cannot relate to someone who only (mostly) view's their own accomplishments as bargaining chips for money/prestige. Even accomplishments that could have widespread benefit to others.

But I accept productive people can operate in different ways.