Title inflation is bad for everyone

In some professional settings, when I had to meet new people; often during the greeting people say “Hi, I am ABC and I am the << insert fancy title>>” and look back at me, while my responsibilities were at similar level I did not have a fancy title. I have always been associated with companies which did not go for fancy titles and it has been a downhill when there needs to be a peer to peer conversation but it ends up in a hierarchical communication.

This has a big domino effect and people want bigger and fancier titles much earlier in their life. My dad retired as an engineer and when I looked into his career path, he was not called an engineer until he spent 5–6 years as a technical assistant to the engineer, another 5 years as deputy engineer and finally an engineer when he had enough experience and wisdom to handle a lot of things. Now we started calling people who connect cables to the modem as service engineers.

Different people are motivated by different things, for a few people status is one of them but by succumbing to that need we put a lot of others at a disadvantage because; now every one has to play the game to make sure there is proper titles associated to them based on the years of experience or the volume of things they are handling.

Looking forward to a future where titles do not matter that much and we stick only the basic ones. We should not have inflated titles to the point where people are judging someone’s worth by the title they carry.

Originally published at http://vinodkumaar.wordpress.com on September 1, 2020.