Engineering Director.
Senior Engineer—wait, they're only two years out of school?
Three-time CEO… of companies with no employees, hm.
Vice President. Are we talking about a big tech company, a tiny startup, or a financial institution?
Job titles are funny things. They're these sticky labels, used to signify importance and authority—particularly in work-obsessed America. We line them up in our résumés and CVs, and we tell our managers about aspiring for a promotion to the next title[1][2].
It therefore feels contrarian to do away with titles, yet there have been real attempts to wipe away the labels, either to tamp down corporate politics or flatten the organization or both[3]. The result, then, is an organization that runs with only a handful of visible titles, as seen from the outside: no VPs or Directors, Senior Staff or Principals, Regional or National Managers. I experienced this a decade ago at Square, where the primary title descriptor beyond the job function was "lead." In more recent practice, some frontier AI labs have standardized on the Bell Labs-inspired "Member of Technical Staff" (MTS) as an all-encompassing title for all technical functions and levels.
Now, there is merit to the instinct of taking away titles as a distraction from the otherwise organic dynamics of the workplace. The depth, maturity and capability of your colleagues tend to reveal themselves through collaboration over time, in theory, so the value of their titles as signposts diminishes quickly regardless. In fact, some of the sharpest rebukes I've heard from coworkers are griping about the delta between someone's title and their actual performance.
With promotions, the chief mistake is confusing prescription for description—assuming that authority immediately and irrevocably flows from a new title, instead of the other way around. I'm reminded of an old LinkedIn post that properly delineated role from influence; in this particular anecdote, the author initially believed getting the "manager" title would grant them the necessary influence to make major changes. They later appreciated that they could earn that influence regardless of their official position, as managerial diktat produces the wrong outcomes anyway.
But here's the problem: removing the labels by which politics are explicitly legible doesn't remove the underlying power dynamics inherent in groups. I came across this theory while reading Why Managers Matter. Known as the Iron Law of Oligarchy, it was originally an observation about how socialist political parties in the early 20th century eventually and organically developed hierarchies—oligarchies—due to the basic mechanics of running any complex system. In the context of companies and organizations, this tendency suggests that groups of people naturally solve coordination problems by elevating and entrenching those coordinators into, well, management.
Refusing to formally name and label these roles just means the hierarchy exists informally instead. In the past, I've referred to these hidden norms and structures as Shadow Systems, and it was absolutely disorienting when I was thrust into a team with such a system running in the background. At Square, I learned to navigate 1:1 blitzes in office cabanas and to identify which unofficial Slack channels made the consequential product decisions.
Case in point: years later, a subdued Square published their internal career ladder publicly. They try really hard to avoid industry-standard titles, but a department leader certainly sounds like a Director-level manager; at least, levels.fyi's mapping seems to think so.
And the current iteration of the "flat/no titles" trend hides an insidious second-order effect. Titles serve as industry-wide shorthand, and indeed, a former CTO joining Anthropic as a plain MTS is newsworthy only because of their prior C-suite position. It's precisely those already secure in their accolades and previous roles who get to claim they're merely advancing an egalitarian structure. A billionaire who takes a token $1 salary isn't automatically virtuous.
Two things can be true: indexing on titles as a singular proxy for authority is bad, yet getting rid of all titles as a solution is also problematic. As silly as they sometimes feel, corporations adopted the scheme because it makes for more efficient processes—as unbelievable as that sounds. Yes, people attach themselves to status labels and distort their meaning, but I find that preferable to removing them in favor of playing a game of shadow hierarchies.
They are also maddeningly inconsistent across industries, companies, and sometimes organizations and teams. On some days, it feels completely arbitrary. ↩︎
Yet, it is uncouth to speak of titles when among friends. ↩︎
There were attempts to move even further away from traditional corporate structures, such as Zappos's and GitHub's attempts at holacracy. None of them scaled. ↩︎
