A very nice thing happened this week — a few months ago I hurled myself into the byzantine system known as the “Google promotion process” and successfully managed to go from L4 “Quantitative UX Researcher” to L5 “Senior Quantitative UX Researcher”.
What’s more interesting to know is that this is the first time in my ~14ish years working in industry that I’ve actually been promoted into a new job title as opposed to just switching jobs (voluntarily or otherwise). More interestingly, for around 8 years, more than half of my career thus far, I simply held the title of “data analyst”, across multiple companies. This was despite my experience, and commensurate salary rising, around 2-2.5x during that period.
So this happy event seemed like a good stopping point to take a pause and look at what the heck happened over those years. There’s endless articles out in the world about whether job titles matter or not, as well as endless mountains of advice (often conflicting) for people looking to start their careers. I feel no urge to add to that pile.
In contrast, there’s relatively few things out there that talk about later-stages of a career, presumably because it’s too individualized at this point. Or perhaps it’s somehow assumed people have it figured out? Well, I don’t have things figured out, so writing this down will help me think, and maybe others can find useful bits too.
First off, why is this significant enough to write about?
Job title changes happen to people all the time for various reasons, so why is this one significant? Well, G’s hiring and processes process are both known for being byzantine. I’m not going to add to the already copious digital ink that criticizes or praises the process.
For those who don’t read up on tech hiring culture (which is, hoepfully, most of us), the brief summary is that the system has been designed to focus on solving certain kinds of people/HR issues, such as enforcing a degree of impartiality (via lots of anonymous committee reviews and codified job ladder bars) and a strong aversion for false positives (because attrition is relatively low).
In the context of promotions, what winds up happening is that you effectively have to work and provide evidence that you’re doing L+1 work consistently before they “hire” you at that level. Promotions are a kind of high-effort, low-risk mini job application for a higher rank. If you fail to get the promo, nothing bad usually happens beyond spending a bunch of your time preparing. In this system, your title is a retroactive recognition of your work. I suppose it’s a deliberate choice to avoid the Peter Principle, since once someone is ratcheted up a level, it appears hard to undo it.
Sure, there are definitely positive and negative aspects in such a system. In putting energy into doing one set of things, it winds up putting less energy into others. Ultimately, us cogs in the machine play the game we’re handed. I’m not an experienced people-manager so I honestly haven’t put sufficient thought into these systems to have confident opinions on them. From where I sit, it’s all complicated machinery that must be navigated without fully understanding why things are the way they are.
Back to the topic at hand. Preparing the promo packet detailing all the work I’ve done the past couple of years in support of the promotion took a lot of of time and planning. Between making sure had my actual work was shown to broad audiences so that people besides my manager knew what I’ve been working on, making sure I was working on sufficiently complex projects, and then all the documentation and writeup involved, the process probably slowly built up over a year and peaked in the final few months. Yes, it’s all stuff that’s part of the day-to-day work, but very often it’s possible to skip broad multi-team presentations and just present to the immediate stakeholder teams.
My honest reaction to the promo news was “Phew, I don’t have to go through this process again.” Many people fail their first attempt at getting a promo, get feedback, spend another 6-months or a year making changes, then try again at the next review cycle before they get it. Sometimes it takes even more attempts.
So… is the title all that important?
Job titles are controversial things, because depending on the situation, there are valid arguments for how they both do, and don’t, matter.
At G, the specific titles don’t get much attention until someone is a “Director” or higher, but Ladder and Level are often used as shorthand for “What this person normally does” and “How senior/skilled they are at it”. That vague social currency is effectively what I “got” out of the whole process along with a pay boost and a new set of requirement bars to hit during review cycles.
But what about outside these wonky walls in the real world?
The advice for early stage career folk that I typically give is that the specific job title isn’t very important. I suspect, with no hard data to back it up, that this is true for a majority of positions.
The early stages of a career, 1-4 years in, are probably best used learning about working in industry and data. Being a junior team member is the best time to make mistakes and learn from everyone else around you, including seeing how good/bad managers work, how to accept/decline work, how to prioritize stuff, etc.. It builds an important foundation that you’ll be relying on for many years to come. You can learn all of that while being a “Business analyst”, “Data analyst”, or “Data engineer”, or whatever.
This learning can be done on a team of people doing the same job, or in a diverse team. Specialization at this point is probably detriment because it’s good to know about how everyone does everything work related. It’ll be useful later in life.
It’s when you get a few years under your belts that opinions about job titles seem to diverge more.
By this point, you’ll have likely changed jobs once or twice, either through promotion or changing jobs. Now that you have a sense of how to be effective at your job, maybe it starts to make sense to think about titles.
While some argue that your projects and demonstrated experience and skills speak louder than a title, the two seem to be pretty decoupled in practice and both carry their own unique uses.
For people in underrepresented groups, job titles often matter more because it can help overcome any stereotypes and biases of others. It’s a piece of external validation and social recognition that might get them a seat at the table that would otherwise be unfairly denied to them. Despite how squishy and vague actual titles are company to company, it is often better to have a good title than not. So places that have vague, or no job titles at all can actually be a detriment to those folk.
As an Asian male working in tech that’s not trying to become an executive, I probably got away with not having a “prestigious” title and only being a “data analyst” for a long time because I didn’t face as many of those issues as others do. I’m good at what I do and my reputation reflects that, but at the same time no one looks at my face and automatically assumes I’m bad at math either. Do what appears right for your situation.
Very often, the people who say you don’t need the prestige of a fancy title are the same folk who rely on the prestige of something else to signal their value and authority. Maybe they’re famous in their field, maybe they have a storied history, maybe they’ve earned it in various ways. Or maybe they’re benefiting from other sources of privilege.
Working without a fancy title
Grand scheme of things, having “Senior” stuck in front of my title doesn’t mean much. The basket of skills I carry along with me between jobs was my main door opener for years, and a retroactive recognition doesn’t change the basket. So how did I get stuck there?
Since I spent the majority of my career working at tiny <150 person startups, I was almost always the sole data person in an entire organization. There was no job ladder to climb. There weren’t any senior data people to be managed by nor junior people to manage. Even if I was called “Director of All Things Data” I’d still be writing SQL for dashboards because no one else had those skills. I was working with C-level folk most weeks, simply because why the heck would a tiny company need middle managers?
So I wound up with a plain job title that was promptly forgotten and ignored. The size of the org meant I could easily show people what my skills are directly, and that’s how I built credibility. I had a name, a face, did useful work, and sat 3 seats away. That’s all people needed to know to get their data needs fulfilled.
This was also how I would market myself in job interviews — “Hey, you have these specific problems, I’ve worked on such problems before, I can help you.” In the small startup space, this strategy works because there’s no rigid hierarchies and most skills, however esoteric, can be put to use.
But in a large 100k+ employee megacorp, or even just a company that’s 500 people, this strategy falls apart. You can’t have a direct connection with everyone any more, and thus have to rely on social constructs, titles and levels, for signaling skills and seniority. Large societies, including companies, can’t really function without ways for members to either determine, or communicate, the pecking order.
Luckily, titles and levels vary so much between companies in industry companies have mechanisms for evaluating skills separately. Since one company’s “Senior Widget Engineer 4000” might be skill-equivalent to “Normal TeaScript Developer 4/3”. This means that assuming you can get to the part where skill evaluation usually happens, the full interview, you can land a position without having a fancy title.
So why is the fancy title useful? Because it checks various boxes, both in HR algorithms, and in people’s heads. It provides an anchoring point for conversation, and lets their imaginations use it to fill in the blanks for all the topics that can’t fit into a 1 hour interview talk.
So what didn’t go so well?
Looking back at my career path thus far, I think I had blundered into a local maxima by spending a decade in small startups. Being the only data person for such a long time, I was like an RPG character that dumped all their skill points into independence, working across teams, and handling all sorts of direct data issues. But that came at a cost — I would never build up any experience points in directly managing people or leading huge multi-team efforts because that sort of work just wasn’t readily available.
Then, often due to factors largely outside of my control, I parted ways with the companies before they expanded to a point where they needed to build an actual data team. I didn’t realize I was living in a structural dead zone for a while.
While all the specialization in being a data generalist (heh) probably paid off in getting me to where I am now, I think it was a career bottleneck. Not being in a place tha thad larger teams and more sprawling organizations that needed navigating meant I didn’t have those skills and track record on hand to show and get hired at L5 instead of entering at L4 and taking 3 years to promote up.
If I were the sort to actually plan out my career (instead of just taking opportunities as they arose, often out of necessity) I should have made some effort find a position that had a data team 5-8 years into industry instead of being a solo expert the whole time. But then, I never expected to join a megacorp either, despite reveling in the chaos and ambiguity of smaller teams. Life’s unpredictable.
About this newsletter
I’m Randy Au, currently a Quantitative UX researcher, former data analyst, and general-purpose data and tech nerd. The Counting Stuff newsletter is a weekly data/tech blog about the less-than-sexy aspects about data science, UX research and tech. With occasional excursions into other fun topics.
All photos/drawings used are taken/created by Randy unless otherwise noted.
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