Titles are not free money
In a hiring market this wild, a bigger title feels like the one thing that costs nothing to offer. I'm suspicious of anything that feels that free.
There’s always that point in every boardgame where somebody realizes that the bank never runs out of money. That’s when the game is broken.
When I hear about job offers this fall, that’s one of those things I’m thinking about a lot.
It’s crazy out there. Candidates have three or four offers. An engineer who looked set on Monday gets inked elsewhere by Thursday. If it’s crazy out there, you start wondering whether you ought to pull on all the levers. One particularly tempting lever you think you can pull without cost. You can just put “Senior”. Or “Staff”. Yes, money is constrained by the budget. And equity is constrained by the cap table. But the title is only constrained by your ability to constrain yourself. And in October there’s not much of that around.
I can understand why candidates would want it. It affects how people treat you. It affects what the next company is going to offer. It’s meaningful to the person holding it. And that’s why I get uncomfortable when I think about making more of those.
People talk. They always do. If some guy comes in who’s interviewed below the bar, but comes in above it now, the engineers who made it to that level are going to notice. And they’re going to learn something about that ladder that’s hard to unlearn. And for the guy who got the bigger title, it’s not an easy time either, relative to the expectations that they weren’t ready for. And then you start comparing against that for every future offer. And the levels start creeping up, like helium balloons. And before long, you forget what they were tethered to.
The market is saying that if you want someone at that level, it’s more than your band can pay. That sounds like you have the wrong band to me. It’s like trying to fix a leaking roof by giving the bucket a new name.
And I guess some candidates will still be walking out the door because some other company made the business card say a bigger word. I’ve sort of come to terms with that.
I wonder, though. How many of those bigger words will be worth anything in two years?