Jan 28, 2022 9 min read

I don’t know what to think about job titles

I'm on a roll with the animal photos (Shutterstock)

Part of the reason I decided to start writing the entirely selfish desire to figure out what I think about things that interest me. Over the last month or so I’ve come over two very distinct schools of thought on the subject of whether job titles are a good or a bad thing in a company and I’ve not been able to decide where I land on it. In this post I’ll outline both positions, then try and settle on what side I find more persuasive.

Titles Are Toxic!

They’re misleading

The best one-line statement of why titles might be toxic that I’ve read comes from Managing Humans by Michael Lopp. He thinks that “titles place an unfortunate absolute professional value on individuals”, and that whilst they started out as a way of giving peoples’ careers structure and something to grow towards, that they have become toxic for the reason that they are assigned somewhat arbitrarily and that they fail to capture the unique contribution that individuals make to companies.

For example, two people at the “Senior Software Engineer” job band might have wildly different skills and experience, to the degree that the title tells you very little about their capabilities or what they actually do. This is especially true when you’re comparing across dissimilar companies, a software engineer in a large, established company might strictly write code, whereas one in a startup might have pre or post-sales responsibilities that aren’t at all captured in a formal job title.

Essentially the argument is that they put people in inaccurate boxes and don’t tell you very much, which brings me neatly on to the next thing.

They get people to focus on the wrong things

Others people think that they are even more dangerous than that, especially in a start up environment. The argument goes that the box / title encourages a person to act in a certain way, for instance doing what a “VP of Business Development” would do, rather than focusing on what the business needs and doing whatever they can towards that goal. They think it’s also better to let people choose their own job titles because along with the above, it keeps peoples’ egos in check and prevents in-fighting over status.

On a personal note, I have noticed that it’s slightly strange when you have some people in a company who have chosen their own job titles and gone for traditional sounding ones and others who have chosen more off the wall ones (or yet others who have none at all). I guess the lack of consistency is part of the charm of working for a startup, but for me it creates the feeling of some people being ‘serious’ and others not, and I’m not sure which group I want to be a part of!

They lead to a scarcity mindset

This point is made by another author who thinks that titles encourage competition rather than the doing of great work. They say that the problem with titles is that instead of facilitating cooperation and providing clarity, we’ve turned them into a bargaining chip. The issue comes back to scarcity, and the mindset that scarcity creates. It makes you feel that you have to grab on to what you have and always compete to acquire more lest someone else gets it instead. Titles are an inherently scarce resource in most organisations, and more importantly so is the status that comes with them, so their very existence encourages competition rather than collaboration between team members.

Titles Are great!

Flat Organisations Don’t Scale

One of the first arguments that I came across when researching this topic is that titles are necessary because flat organisational structures don’t scale. The linked article lists a few high profile organisational climb downs, with companies such as Github and Medium abandoning flat or holacratic structures and returning to something more orthodox.

The primary reason for this seems to be that the difficulty of coordinating a group of people increases geometrically with the number of team members (consider how a group of 3 people has 3 lines of communication, whereas a group of 14 have 91). Getting buy-in and alignment from any group of people takes time, and, so the argument goes, it’s more efficient to only have to get the buy in of a small group of people higher in the hierarchy whose job it is to then go and sell it to their reports.

The point is echoed in this article by Stanford professor Bob Sutton who cites what happened at Google when (as a company of 400) they axed their middle management. (Spoilers - it wasn’t good). Without that layer of management, the executives were overwhelmed by the sheer number of problems that flowed their way, it became impossible for them to do their job and influence what was happening in the company.

The logic then goes that if you’re going to have hierarchy, you might as well accurately reflect that, which brings me on to the next thing.

A lack of titles is a denial of reality

Returning to the above article, there’s a persuasive case to be made that avoiding titles and structure is a fundamental denial of human nature, and it just leads to the formation of a secret, implicit structure instead. There’s extensive academic literature that demonstrates that it’s impossible to find any primate grouping, from humans to bonobos, where all group members enjoy equal status. Studies have shown that hierarchies are observable just minutes after a group of (human) strangers are introduced.

As such it’s inevitable that power structures and hierarchies will form in every organisation. The danger is that by letting them go unacknowledged you not only drastically reduce efficiency, you also let the people in positions of power become unaccountable since they hold no ‘formal’ power at all. These ’shadow’ power structures are often invisible to people who aren’t ‘in the know’, which can make it very difficult to integrate new hires successfully and make the company feel cliquey to people once they figure it out.

There’s also research that shows that people with power but no status have a higher propensity to create toxic working environments, which makes this shadow structure potentially even more damaging. This happens because their lack of status can mean that other people don’t afford them much respect, which in turns means that they use their power to act on the negative feelings that lack of respect creates.

It creates disengagement amongst employees

In Drive, Daniel Pink makes the case that building towards mastery is a key part of peoples’ intrinsic motivation to work. Titles (and associated career structure) can be a motivator for reasons other than the scarcity related reasons I mentioned above. They can help give people the sense of progression and can help show people that they are on the right track with their efforts, providing a very tangible source of feedback.

There’s also the elephant in the room, that there is a certain pleasure that the ego takes in the recognition that comes from a fancy sounding job title or from progressing on a ladder. On a personal level this isn’t something that I feel good about, but it’s undeniably true. I think it’s a combination of things I think - it’s the recognition and therefore the respect/status that you expect to receive, along with the sense of having achieved something concrete by progressing. I don’t think I’m alone in having a mind that works this way, so perhaps it’s better to work with that than against it.

So?

After a bunch of head scratching this is where I’ve personally landed.

I think titles aren’t a good thing in very small companies

I think that what’s right for a given organisation when it comes to job titles and hierarchy is down to size. If you’re a company of 15 people then (serious) job titles are probably a bad thing. The number of lines of communication are low, people need to be able to take on a number of roles rather than have clearly delineated jobs, scale isn’t a problem, and neither is progression since you’re all just trying to ship something. Yes, even in a group that small there will be leaders and followers, there’s a hierarchy whether you want to admit it or not, but it’s not particularly damaging to let it go unacknowledged since everyone knows everyone and, just like a group of friends don’t need an org-chart, neither do you.

But as a company grows, it needs some, but not many

I think this changes though as an organisation grows, and about the time that you hire your first bunch of managers you need to accept the fact that a solid hierarchy exists and needs to be acknowledged. In the past I’ve definitely conflated hierarchy and job titles, but I do think that having some small number of descriptive job titles makes it easier for people to know who to talk to in order to get stuff done. I can see how possible to define a hierarchy (this person reports to this person, all the way up) and use non-hierarchical terms to describe it, but I’m not sure it adds much.

I found the argument around shadow power structures quite compelling, so I think that deciding not to document reality in a way that everyone can understand (i.e. an org chart) can actually be really dangerous thing to do, both for your company’s culture and its ability to execute. Again, once you’ve done that, I don’t think there’s much left to be gained by still insisting that job titles aren’t a thing. Everyone can see, for instance, that the person reporting to the totally-not-the-CEO who has all the sales folks reporting to her/him is, in fact, the head of sales, so why not call a duck a duck?

I’m am still undecided on whether it’s wise to let people pick their own titles. First of all, if you are going to let people choose there own then I think you need guidance (choose something that other people will understand), as titles are an important part of helping new folk know who to talk to about a given topic. I also think that there’s also danger in letting people give themselves titles that they’re clearly not going to keep as the organisation scales (let’s imagine you have your first HR person who is 2 years out of University. They can call themselves VP of HR as much as they want, it’s not a title they’ll be keeping when the org is 500 people). This is another thing that can be addressed by adequate guidance though, so maybe the whole thing is basically fine.

And I still think I don’t like ‘ladders’

One area that I’ve still not addressed are those places where it’s not strictly necessary for hierarchy to exist. Let’s take an engineering team (given that’s what I do). Is there any benefit to the ‘engineering ladder’ that you get in most companies? Sure, there’s the motivation aspect of progression, but I can’t shake the feeling that there are equally good ways of helping people progress as a manager that don’t require the potential toxic competition that comes from conversations like “Why is he Level Y and I’m only level X?”. Sure, it’s harder work for the manager, it requires them to develop a deep understanding of someone’s career and their aspirations, but I think it’s better than the hoop jumping.

Without a ladder I think it’s really important to be clear who has technical decision making power (and therefore accountability for the decisions getting made), so there’s still a need for limited ‘lead’ or ‘architect’ titles, or perhaps you can demonstrate it through membership of the kind of ‘Design and Architecture’ group that is mentioned in Managing Humans. Regardless I think it’s important to make sure that you don’t end up with those shadow power structures that I mentioned earlier, and it is really important that engineers don’t feel like they have to become managers to progress their career. I think I need to reflect more on this topic, it doesn’t feel like I’ve thought this through enough, but this post is long enough already!

Anyway, thanks for reading this far, I’m really curious as to what other people’s thoughts and experiences are in this area. As ever you can comment on Linkedin or drop me an email at paul@paulmerrison.io. Thanks for reading!