The Changes #2: Demotions

Recently, we have a new CTO and a new Head Of Development. Like all new managers with power, they want to make their own changes.

In The Changes #1, I explained changes to job titles of Testers. Some Developers are also affected.

Currently, the hierarchy is basically Junior, Developer, Senior, Principal, Architect. With the new changes, we planned on removing the Principals so they will become Senior.

When I think about it, there aren’t that many Principals, and their job is really the same responsibilities of a Senior. To be honest, there isn’t actually any difference in responsibility between the standard Developer role as well.

I actually like these titles though. If implemented correctly, it gives you a clear indication of people’s skill level. With the new titles, if managers created 2 teams consisting of 1 Senior, 3 Developers and a Junior in a team. If one team’s Senior is a standard Senior, and the other team’s Senior is the former Principal, then this second team has a massive advantage because they have a leader that is at a significant skill level. I know it’s not a competition, but developers will want to be in successful teams.

With job titles, if you manage to persuade a promotion, then your wage should jump up to that band. If you remove the level, then it puts the power towards the employer to suppress your wages. It’s much harder to justify an increase if you don’t accept more responsibility (or have a title that implies responsibility, even if there actually is none).

I can’t speak for everyone, but a better job title is a massive motivator for me. I have been suffering low motivation for a while because my team members see me as a Senior but I have just had the Developer title. It hasn’t happened many times, but there’s definitely been a few occasions where I felt people haven’t accepted my idea because someone with a Senior job title suggested something else – so they automatically sided with them. So I think you automatically gain respect among certain colleagues.

If I had earned a fancy job title and my employer took that away from me, I would be very angry. If it took people a long time to gain that title, it would be devastating. I guess that means that Colin should have moved back down to Senior which is a much more appropriate job title for him.

However, after about a week, this idea was silently squashed. I found out because I asked a Principal Developer what he thought of the demotion, and he said it wasn’t happening due to the amount of negative feedback the managers received. 

The thing is though, surely anyone with common sense would know that people weren’t going to react positively. If the managers were willing to back down that quickly, then how did the idea even get to the stage where managers agreed to announce it to the department?