Yes Chief - you are in command.

It had never occurred to me what titles could do to the human psyche until a couple of years ago when I noticed the lapel on the Subway sandwich maker’s shirt in Alabama emblazoned with the phrase ‘sandwich artist’ which left me baffled. A few summers later, I still wonder if the sandwich artist made sandwiches any better. The 6 inch veggie sandwich, staple and simple remains my all time favorite at Subway and has been my savior many an occasion when there simply wasn’t a choice for vegans like me. Over the years, one thing I have noticed while meeting people at work, interviewing candidates for my company, vendors, partners is the pride they carry flaunting titles. When it comes to job titles, we live in an age of rampant inflation. Everyone you come across is a chief or a president or a director of some variety not to mention the few grand prefixes such as ‘global’, ’interface’ and customer, and hey presto


While some of these titles add color and dignity to the task itself, I believe there is a lot of motivation for people to be called a ‘specialist’. A growing number of companies have a chief for everything from knowledge to diversity. This was certainly turning out to be so interesting that I decided to spend some time researching on it and what I discovered left me amused if not shocked. Fathom this- Southwest airlines have a chief twitter officer while Coca-Cola and Marriott have chief blogging officers (these must be the easiest of the CXO league-or is it!) Kodak must surely be the trendsetter-they even have a chief listening officer (had heard of agony aunts!). Some more that I found from America’s International Association of Administrative professionals ‘ defined umbrella of job titles were paper boys can be called as ‘media distribution officers’, Binmen are ‘recycling officers’ and ‘lavatory cleaners are ‘sanitation consultants’. Even the linguistically pure French are not behind, the cleaning ladies are called ‘techniciennes de surface’ (surface technicians). I am not sure what is the rationale behind such titles, one obvious and probably a structural reason could be the growing complexity of businesses. You now need a VP for a product and also for a geography and end up with something like Vice President for Espresso vender –Asia Pacific !

The cult of flexibility is also the fact that inflationary and flat hierarchies have the paradoxical effect of multiple meaningless job titles. A feeling of ascending the ranks (although illusionary) is what the human psyche craves for. The technology industry has been the forerunner in introducing all sorts of new fangled job titles. The IT types like me and others continue to dub ourselves as gurus, scrum master s and the hottest one these days is the ninja. Meanwhile, I need to get to bed early and be ready for that 10 AM meeting with my ‘automation specialist’ to resolve that nagging issue with automating pdf reports. Over the years, I have been called a subject matter expert, outbound specialist, ‘manual tester’, ’automation engineer’, 'DB tester' and with all the experience and a few gray hairs and ofcourse the tester’s holy grail in hand – Am I a test evangelist yet? Or does it even matter!