
Titles and Promotions (Ben Horowitz) - amirmc
http://bhorowitz.com/2011/03/17/titles-and-promotions/
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ojbyrne
One of the (I thought) most useless courses I took in B-School was called
Organizational Design - it seemed mostly to be about whether to put functional
hierarchy or geographical hierarchy at the top level of the company. At some
point during my startup experience I realized that OD is actually important,
but the key insight is that it isn't a static thing - a single chart that you
make and that's it. Instead it's dynamic, changing as the company grows, and
as the people within the company grow.

How you manage the hierarchy of a growing company is crucial to managing
people. It's nice to think that at a startup everyone is egoless, and will do
what needs to get done, but its not true in the long run. People have careers
and goals, and they will need to see their contributions reflected by the
company contributing back to their career and goals.

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j_baker
A couple of miscellaneous thoughts on this:

1\. When you give titles to people, give them based on how you see peoples'
places in a company being in the future, not what they've done in the past.
It's incredibly common for people to be really spectacular at the earlier
stages of a startup and get put in a position of authority where they start
causing problems when the company scales.

2\. I don't believe in people having a "level of incompetence". More common is
when you give someone a promotion based on their performance in a non-
management/leadership job and discover that although they are good at doing
who the jobs of the people they're managing, they aren't good managers.

3\. Be _really_ careful with giving people titles that imply some kind of
authority over their peers. Even the smallest bit of authority can make
otherwise pleasant people turn evil.

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gaius
The old Bell Labs had this right: everyone had the title "Member of the
Technical Staff". Including Ken Thompson, Dennis Richie, Brian Kernighan...

~~~
Bystander
My title in AD is IT Support Monkey. I figure that's enough.

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sriramk
Titles matter in a lot of companies because if you want to find a new job, the
title is used to 'level' you. Do you want to be a VP at <well-known-tech-
company>? You probably need to have a strong title at your previous role too.

On a tangential topic, somebody once pointed out to me that reading the exec
bio pages at tech companies makes for interesting reading. If you skip past
the famous founders, you'd find a very large number of people from a
background which goes something like this \- Go to B-school (preferably
Harvard) \- Join one of the consulting firms. McKinsey is great on your resume
\- Leave McKinsey and join into a management role at a some large company \-
Switch jobs every 2 years - each title being larger than the previous one,
wind up as SVP at famous startup/large tech company.

If you're someone who wants such a career trajectory, a title 'deflation' is
going to hurt you.

Having said all that, if I do a startup, I wouldn't want to hire someone who
cares so much about their title. It just doesn't...feel right.

~~~
akshat
Who would not want to hire people who don't care about money, titles, stock
options and works 24/7? There are very few people like that.

Even people who are joining Facebook at a step down are not doing this because
they are above materialistic desires. Having Facebook on your resume today is
like having Google on your resume 5 years back.

We should stop kidding ourselves about trying to find the truly selfless smart
person.

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Murkin
The only solution that I have seen working to solve the "Peter Principle"
problem, is re-org.

Once in a while, parts of the org chart, get re-organized. People moved
vertically and horizontally. Carefully moving the "newly incompetent" to a
horizontal position that suits their competence level (ie remove the
responsibilities that they handle badly and increase those they handle well).

~~~
hapless
I realize that anecdotes make for very poor data, but I have never seen a re-
org work. I've survived dozens of reorgs at my own employer and at client
firms, and I have never, ever seen a successful one. The best you can hope for
is to see incompetent management pushed into do-nothing positions, such that
the damage they do is contained.

More often, the shuffle creates new fiefdoms, new dotted line bosses, and not
one substantive improvement in function. (It's usually too painful to make the
necessary horizontal changes to push "peter principle" types into harmless
positions. These people are the re-organizers' friends, vassals, or patrons.
What inhuman manager could bear to throw his friends under the bus to no
immediate advantage for himself?)

For example: when you have turf war between two managers, a re-org creates the
opportunity for turf war between three or more: the old empire-builder who was
ejected, the new empire-builder brought in, and the manager who was already
encroaching on the old fief.

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rwolf
I find this whole vocabulary for describing your office environment (empire-
builder, fiefdom, turf war, etc) to be incredibly negative. Thinking or your
peers as bumbling warlords has got to make your time at the office a pain.

That said, I have not worked at a large company before, so I might think the
same way in your shoes.

~~~
PakG1
The problem is that in large companies, that is the way it works. Politics are
an unfortunate fact of life just due to human nature.

In my opinion, the biggest reason why those upper management folks in big
companies make those mistakes when they reorg is because they don't have a
view of what happens in the trenches. The details are critical when
determining whether a specific service can be provided by a specific group and
be tracked by a specific system.

They don't get that a system's order database has a data structure that can't
accommodate a new category of product types and a new way of doing work. They
crunch the numbers, but the inefficiency lost from poor processes due to lack
of understanding at the ground level makes those numbers meaningless in the
end.

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pauldisneyiv
"Does Facebook ever miss out on a new hire due to its low titles? Yes,
definitely"

Anyone else find this to be terribly pathetic?

~~~
pauldisneyiv
Just to be clear - I meant pathetic of the individual turning down employment
from Facebook.

I do not believe it to be pathetic on the part of Facebook whatsoever - in
fact I love their take on the topic.

