<story><title>The scourge of job title inflation</title><url>https://www.economist.com/business/2022/12/08/the-scourge-of-job-title-inflation</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AdamH12113</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s worth noting that &amp;quot;engineer&amp;quot; itself is a bit of title inflation. &amp;quot;Software engineer&amp;quot; was supposed to involve training people to apply engineering methodologies to software development. Today it&amp;#x27;s just a fancy term for &amp;quot;programmer&amp;quot;.</text></item><item><author>paxys</author><text>I have seen this happen more and more in tech as well. Engineers join a company right out of college, are promoted to &amp;quot;senior&amp;quot; in a couple of years, and &amp;quot;staff&amp;quot; another two or three years after that. Now because everyone is staff you have to keep making up fancier titles – senior staff, principal engineer, technical lead, architect, senior architect, chief of staff, partner engineer, distinguished engineer, technical fellow...&lt;p&gt;I asked a higher up why this was the case, and the response was simply that people quit if they aren&amp;#x27;t promoted quick enough. Titles are free, and smaller companies have zero problems handing them out like candy to keep people happy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>denton-scratch</author><text>I have always referred to my trade as &amp;quot;programmer&amp;quot;. I&amp;#x27;m not a trained engineer. My title-inflation path was something like this:&lt;p&gt;- Sales Support Analyst&lt;p&gt;- Sales Support Specialist&lt;p&gt;- Senior Support Analyst&lt;p&gt;- Software Engineer&lt;p&gt;- Senior Developer&lt;p&gt;I have nothing against the professionalisation of programming; it would be a good thing. But the fact remains that the great majority of programmers are &lt;i&gt;not&lt;/i&gt; engineers. We are tradesmen, a bit like plumbers or domestic electricians. There&amp;#x27;s nothing to be ashamed of in being a skilled tradesman; for a good part of my career, a plumber earned more than I did.</text></comment>
<story><title>The scourge of job title inflation</title><url>https://www.economist.com/business/2022/12/08/the-scourge-of-job-title-inflation</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>AdamH12113</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s worth noting that &amp;quot;engineer&amp;quot; itself is a bit of title inflation. &amp;quot;Software engineer&amp;quot; was supposed to involve training people to apply engineering methodologies to software development. Today it&amp;#x27;s just a fancy term for &amp;quot;programmer&amp;quot;.</text></item><item><author>paxys</author><text>I have seen this happen more and more in tech as well. Engineers join a company right out of college, are promoted to &amp;quot;senior&amp;quot; in a couple of years, and &amp;quot;staff&amp;quot; another two or three years after that. Now because everyone is staff you have to keep making up fancier titles – senior staff, principal engineer, technical lead, architect, senior architect, chief of staff, partner engineer, distinguished engineer, technical fellow...&lt;p&gt;I asked a higher up why this was the case, and the response was simply that people quit if they aren&amp;#x27;t promoted quick enough. Titles are free, and smaller companies have zero problems handing them out like candy to keep people happy.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>resonious</author><text>Yeah, I admit I&amp;#x27;m a sucker for the &amp;quot;engineer&amp;quot; title but what I do makes me feel more like a tradesman then an engineer.&lt;p&gt;At the same time, I remember last year someone interviewed a bunch of non-software engineers who later got into software [1]. A good number of these folks actually do feel like software is still engineering.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.hillelwayne.com&amp;#x2F;post&amp;#x2F;are-we-really-engineers&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.hillelwayne.com&amp;#x2F;post&amp;#x2F;are-we-really-engineers&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>