I know people who are obsessed with titles. They care more about having a particular title than about the responsibilities of the job itself. I once got an email from someone whose signature line had six different acronyms. I guess I was supposed to be impressed by this, but instead I had less esteem for that person out of the gate. 

Your title does not matter to me. In fact, your degrees, your experience, your years in the business do not matter to me. More education, more experience in an industry or in a role are supposed to be consistent with better performance. In the real world, this is not always the case.

They’ll give anyone a senior title. I work with many people who have a senior title. Senior project manager. Senior consultant. What does that mean? Is a senior project manager that much better than just a project manager? It depends on the person. 

Here is a dirty secret of hiring. The only place titles matter is in Human Resources. They classify jobs and salaries based on titles. Have you ever known someone who had a senior title and had no business being senior anything? Here is what probably happened. That person was most likely an external hire and was asking for more money than was allowed for the job he or she applied for. For whatever reason, the company wanted to hire that person. In order to do that, they offered a senior role to be able to pay that person more money. Was the person qualified to carry out the responsibilities of what a senior role should entail? Who knows.

Titles do not matter to me. What matters to me is whether you are good at what you do and get the job done. I call this “running it.” I want to work with people who run it. Are there people who have fancy titles or degrees who run it? Sure. But there are also people who don’t have all the degrees or the experience who have “eye of the tiger” and run it. I am just as happy to have those people on my team.

3-11-20

I wasted a good portion of the day today trying to untangle a mess created by one of the consultants on my team. On his email signature, his title is “Senior Consultant” by the way. He’s been working in the role of a consultant twice as long as I have. 

The work we do is not rocket science and it’s not coding. Still, it requires attention to detail and doing a complete analysis of the impact of all changes to the system. We configure a system that is responsible for auto-adjudicating medical claims. This means one wrong move could lead to thousands of incorrect claim payments and lots of costly rework. 

When you are making changes to a system, you need to have some basic documentation of what changes you’re making and QC your work. None of that was done for this change. When I asked for documentation, I received a report on the changes already completed in the system. Where is the document with all the changes you intend to make so I can compare it to the actual changes? I generally plan my changes and document the solution AND my analysis and reasons for the changes before I make any system updates. Not Mr. Senior Consultant. He knows better and then comes to me when it turns into a mess.