{"id":1112,"date":"2017-10-03T08:39:40","date_gmt":"2017-10-03T15:39:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/?p=1112"},"modified":"2017-10-03T08:39:40","modified_gmt":"2017-10-03T15:39:40","slug":"titles-theyre-still-useless","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/titles-theyre-still-useless\/","title":{"rendered":"Titles &#8211; They&#8217;re Still Useless"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In what seems like a lifetime ago (it&#8217;s been six years), I wrote about <a href=\"http:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/titles-for-testers\/\">Titles for Testers<\/a> (tl;dr &#8211; they don&#8217;t matter). My wordpress stats tell me that it&#8217;s one of my most popular posts with links from a crapload of sites.<\/p>\n<p>The 2017 update is that titles still don&#8217;t matter. Well, they do in a way. Titles (especially for testers) are a\u00a0<em>distraction<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Last night on twitter, I saw this job advertisement tweet.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Blizzard Entertainment is looking for: Test Lead II<a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/VoYZDhJtk3\">https:\/\/t.co\/VoYZDhJtk3<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/job?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#job<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Michael Gilmartin (@MHGilmartin) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/MHGilmartin\/status\/914910613830356993?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">October 2, 2017<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>Totally cool (and worth it) to publish job postings on twitter, and Blizzard makes fantastic (your opinion may vary) games. I&#8217;ve played 1000&#8217;s of hours of Warcraft, Diablo, Starcraft and even some Hearthstone. I should have played Overwatch too, but couldn&#8217;t carve off the time.<\/p>\n<p>Then, there&#8217;s the job title.<\/p>\n<p>WTF is a Test Lead Eleven? Oh wait, those are Roman numerals &#8211; it&#8217;s a Test Lead 2.<\/p>\n<p>Cool.<\/p>\n<p>No.<\/p>\n<p>WTF is a Test Lead II?<\/p>\n<p>Wait, it&#8217;s worse. The <a href=\"http:\/\/jobs.jobvite.com\/careers\/blizzard\/job\/ouvE5fws?jvk=Job&amp;jvi=ouvE5fws,Job&amp;j=ouvE5fws&amp;__jvst=Employee&amp;__jvsd=sxFbTgw1&amp;__jvsc=Twitter&amp;bid=nkzWCBwx\">job description<\/a> describes the job as &#8220;Associate Test Lead&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Again, WTF?<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m sure A Test Lead II falls right between a Test Lead I and a Test Lead III &#8211; or maybe the former is called a Test Lead and the latter a Senior Test lead, but putting that title in that post isn&#8217;t going to help Blizzard (or anyone) find\u00a0 the right candidate. In fact if I were looking for a mid-level test lead job, and I saw a posting with that title, my heeby-jeeby HR bureaucracy spidey sense may tell me to steer clear.<\/p>\n<p>Short story is that it&#8217;s an exciting job for the right person. I&#8217;m not picking on Blizzard &#8211; they&#8217;re awesome. I&#8217;m picking (yet again) on job titles.<\/p>\n<p>Now, it&#8217;s one thing if you&#8217;re recruiting internally. At the Big M, role moves were lateral, and job titles reflected the level of the role. If you&#8217;re advertising the job to people who know what the lingo means, you can use corporate dictated titles. That makes sense.<\/p>\n<p>But when recruiting externally, you have to turn that shit off. If you want to exude an air of fun and excitement, why throw a bureaucratic title into the description? Sure, you&#8217;re going to have to give whoever you hire a title that matches the corporate structure, but that doesn&#8217;t mean you can&#8217;t troll for a Test Lead or Test Leader or Test Manager, or Quality Rockstar, or Badass Guild Master in your external job postings and social media.<\/p>\n<p>Now I&#8217;m off to review job titles at my own company before the discoveries of hypocrisy roll in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In what seems like a lifetime ago (it&#8217;s been six years), I wrote about Titles for Testers (tl;dr &#8211; they don&#8217;t matter). My wordpress stats tell me that it&#8217;s one of my most popular posts with links from a crapload of sites. The 2017 update is that titles still don&#8217;t matter. Well, they do in&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1112\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}