One area that was not discussed at length was the transition from a high tier to a medium tier. In that case the HR at the medium tier often put a lot of weight into the title. I have seen HR teams say thing like "That person was not a principal engineer in their previous job" so they need to come in at a lower level here. They (HR) often don't recognized tiers within the industry, and use titles as a proxy for skill. Many HR staff view a change in title as a direct indication of skill, and when they see someone go from 'Sr. Software Engineer' to 'Software Engineer' they assume a skill demotion. In one of my earlier companies we used the title 'member of technical staff' in a pretty broad context, and I later heard that it was problematic for some people in getting interviews in future jobs. It is stupid, of course, but also a reality.
At one of my previous employers I noticed that a few of my coworkers had created/inflated their job titles on their business cards, so I asked my manager (without naming names) if that was allowed, to which they said it was fine as long as you don't claim to be CEO.
I worked at a company that called everyone Member of the Technical Staff (were you at Cycorp too?), and I just put a more descriptive title on my LinkedIn, resume, etc. I never had a use for business cards so the issue never came up
Ah, no. This was a company called eFusion, which was an early VOIP telecom spinoff from Intel (which is where I started at). The Member of Technical Staff was a very east coast Bell labs like title, which didn't really translate well to other schemes.
