Titles are bogus and everybody wants to be a "senior" something so they claim to not be clueless. Director is a ten-a-penny title like in the Wall Street banks. There, every other person is a VP. It's a total joke.
It's as much a response to regulatory stuff as it is a marketing and perception thing.
All these banks over the years were faced with rules either from their insurers and/or government to the tune of "you must have a process to control X" and they say, "well, ugh, I guess only VPs can do that" and then as they grew and merged and were acquired by each other it pushed the VP title way down the org chart.
Usually this is the “leads the function but we’re not going let them into the c-suite”. The head of engineering gets usurped by the outside cto hire and put out to pasture.
I worked at a bank some years ago me and a co-worker got curious about the whole VP thing and setup a script/query(harder than it sounds)to find the ratio of FTE VP to all other FTE ratio and it was something close to 10:1.
After that we were like ok so VP is basically like what every other company calls a supervisor. We are not going to take crap from them anymore.
One of the perks of the Wall St banks VPs is that they got a desk such that their back was against the wall at the end of an open plan office row. Our VP was very proud of that nobody could look over his shoulder.
>such that their back was against the wall at the end of an open plan office row. Our VP was very proud of that nobody could look over his shoulder.
Oh, so like gunfighters trying to be a bit more safe while sitting in saloons, in Western (cowboy) novels like the Sudden (name of the hero) series by Oliver Strange.
Grew up reading novels like those (and other genres) as a kid. Mainly bull, but somewhat good writing, and entertaining to a green youngster like me at the time, at least.
I've met a few people who have spent time in prison and developed the same habit of always sitting so they're facing the door. One of them told me he just can't feel comfortable otherwise.
I thought this was well-known, that everyone's a VP in the financial sector because a lot of contracts required a VP or higher to sign off on a lot of things and it was easier to make everyone a VP. Sort of like giving everyone sudo access.
That is probably really outdated and no longer a thing. I'm guessing based on what I saw. I remember when we bought some small local bank they told us not to tell the customers/merchants/vendors that basically there would no longer be local decisions made since everything goes through the banks underwriter/contract/ect systems. They literally told the local VP's to pretend they were making decisions.
I'm not sure why I was included in this since I was just working on the migration. They probably didn't know or care that I was there is my guess.
It's not about authority, it's about old-school payscales, created in an era || at traditional / vertical / hierarchical banking corporations when/where it was inconceivable that an IC could merit significantly higher compensation than a manager (let alone a manager of managers). Hence the "bank title" aspect assigned to senior or principal engineers with market rates higher than generic middle managers. An AVP (Associate Vice President) might be a not particularly senior developer.
A lot of the "VP's" would try to throw their title "UH I"M A VP so get it done" around as some sort of weight when they wanted/needed something. Originally we were always like "OH Crap" a VP needs it so it must be important. After a while we noticed the quantity and did the whole research to that conclusion. It greatly reduced our stress/workload.
Yeah I"m aware of the pay-to-title issues though that was secondary.
Could be worse. They could assign demeaning titles "Junior Assistant", "Compliance Associate",etc. I think title inflation is a charming sign of an organization trying show respect to its workers.
