Titles are Toxic: Rands In Repose

Titles are Toxic: Rands In Repose: "never in my life have I ever stared at a fancy title and immediately understood the person’s value"

"The main problem with systems of titles is that people are erratic, chaotic messes who learn at different paces and in different ways. They can be good at or terrible at completely different things, even while doing more or less the same job. A title has no business attempting to capture the seemingly infinite ways by which individuals evolve. They are imprecise frameworks used to measure the masses. To allow leadership to bucket individuals into convenient chunks so they can award compensation and measure seniority while also serving as labels that are somehow expected to give us an idea about expected ability. This is an impossibly tall order and at the root of title toxicity."

"Titles, I believe, are an artifact of the same age that gave us business cards and resumes. They came from a time when information was scarce. When there was no other way to discover who you were other than what you shared via a resume. Where the title of Senior Software Engineer was intended to define your entire career to date."