I think it always depends on the purpose people are trying to achieve here. It helps to solve the problem of creating a team that is capable of taking a project by making the available skills transparent, and it also helps with knowledge sharing.
On the other hand, if the company is using this titles mainly for evaluating how much each person should earn as a salary, this can quickly snowball into a larger discussion. Which, by the way, can be a very interesting one, but maybe one the company is not ready or willing to face at the moment.
I feel there is a bit of paradox. To avoid reducing people into some broad categories this multi-label approach takes even more reductive swing (as in philosophical reductionism) to deconstruct people value even more.
Actually, I think a reductionist would say that you simplify until you're about to lose meaning, then stop. If we assume that something as complex as a human being would need millions of individual categories to describe, the a reductionist would ask "what am I trying to represent?" and then find a way of simplifying these categories down to a more manageable abstraction. Having a dozen categories describing a person's abilities is less of a reduction than having one :)
So instead of reducing the complexities of what someone can contribute into a scalar, the idea is to turn it into a vector. OK. But why? For one thing, there’s already a periodic interaction one has with an organization that tells you how much you are valued. (Yeah, that.) For another, in any organization where a reasonable level of communication exists there is always a general knowledge of who knows what and who can potentially be most helpful with certain classes of problems.
I mean titles can be cool. I once wanted a new title because I didn’t think the one I had represented my role well. “How about ‘Duke’?” I asked.
I think it always depends on the purpose people are trying to achieve here. It helps to solve the problem of creating a team that is capable of taking a project by making the available skills transparent, and it also helps with knowledge sharing.
On the other hand, if the company is using this titles mainly for evaluating how much each person should earn as a salary, this can quickly snowball into a larger discussion. Which, by the way, can be a very interesting one, but maybe one the company is not ready or willing to face at the moment.
I feel there is a bit of paradox. To avoid reducing people into some broad categories this multi-label approach takes even more reductive swing (as in philosophical reductionism) to deconstruct people value even more.
Actually, I think a reductionist would say that you simplify until you're about to lose meaning, then stop. If we assume that something as complex as a human being would need millions of individual categories to describe, the a reductionist would ask "what am I trying to represent?" and then find a way of simplifying these categories down to a more manageable abstraction. Having a dozen categories describing a person's abilities is less of a reduction than having one :)
Oh my.
So instead of reducing the complexities of what someone can contribute into a scalar, the idea is to turn it into a vector. OK. But why? For one thing, there’s already a periodic interaction one has with an organization that tells you how much you are valued. (Yeah, that.) For another, in any organization where a reasonable level of communication exists there is always a general knowledge of who knows what and who can potentially be most helpful with certain classes of problems.
I mean titles can be cool. I once wanted a new title because I didn’t think the one I had represented my role well. “How about ‘Duke’?” I asked.
I miss that gig sometimes.