I’m Not Impressed with Your Self-Elevating Job Title

Ben Horowitz of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz discusses giving employees ego-boosting new job titles to appease them for not receiving a promotion or a pay increase:

Should your company make Vice President the top title or should you have Chief Marketing Officers, Chief Revenue Officers, Chief People Officer’s, and Chief Snack Officers? There are two schools of thought regarding this.

Marc Andreessen argues that people ask for many things from a company: salary, bonus, stock options, span of control, and titles. Of those, title is by far the cheapest, so it makes sense to give the highest titles possible… If it makes people feel better, let them feel better. Titles cost nothing. Better yet, when competing for new employees with other companies, using Andreessen’s method you can always outbid the competition in at least one dimension.

And, as a counterpoint, the pitfalls of job title inflation:

At Facebook, by contrast, Mark Zuckerberg… avoids accidentally giving new employees higher titles and positions than better performing existing employees. This boosts morale and increases fairness. Secondly, it forces all the managers of Facebook to deeply understand and internalize Facebook’s leveling system which serves the company extremely well in their own promotion and compensation processes. He also wants titles to be meaningful and reflect who has influence in the organization. As a company grows quickly, it’s important to provide organizational clarity wherever possible and that gets more difficult if there are 50 VPs and 10 Chiefs.

It’s become trendy to create and bandy about outlandish job titles and inflate career profiles.

I’m never impressed with self-elevating titles (e.g., Revenue Protection Officer for a Train Ticket Inspector, Director of First Impressions for a Receptionist) that make you sound like a pretentious, egotistical, and obnoxious person.

Your job title is supposed to help me understand what you do without having to open up the dictionary.

Yes, vague and puzzling job titles surface partly because the world is changing, and so are trades and occupations. Some new job titles are going to be needed.

But it’d be great if we could get by with a much smaller and simpler inventory of descriptive job titles.

Idea for Impact: Avoid bogus grandeur—challenge job title inflation. Don’t assign senior-sounding job titles to those with middle-ranking wages.