In my idle hours I often dream of a job that requires little effort, large rewards and the admiration of all. Ideally, this job should involve working from home, preferably with an outside pool in a clement climate, where I can dispatch wisdom via teleconference to my colleagues whilst enjoying the warm sunshine.
As an engineer, I have had a variety of job titles in my career which have been often of the form <grade> <discipline> Engineer such as Junior Hardware Engineer or Senior Systems Engineer. These jobs have not been low effort and I would not wish to be seen to be moaning as they were hardly boring or poorly paid. However no job to date has satisfied the "Large Reward" criteria. I have concluded that I need a better job title to help the situation, this conclusion was somewhat inspired by learning that many marketing professionals had started to use the title: chief storyteller.
Getting the word Technologist into your job title seemed like it might be a step forward as these people often gain increased latitude to develop interesting ideas and I am guessing the remuneration was adequate. However, I came to the conclusion that this was not sufficiently ambiguous. The world of technology is not afraid of unusual job titles, I have actually met someone whose business card described them as an evangelist and the following article provides some quite believable examples: The Biggest Bullshit Job Titles in Tech. An associate of mine has already reserved the title Guru of Tremendousness, although he is yet to discuss that aspiration with his manager, I think he might be going along the right lines. Famously Chade-Meng Tan, Google employee number 107, had the job title: Jolly Good Fellow, however as a humble Englishman I would find that uncomfortable. Meng was going along the right lines though in my opinion, ensuring the title gave no clue as to what it was he did.
Over a lunch break I have discussed the options with my colleagues (most of whom are clearly just humouring me), incorporating the word Visionary into the title seemed to show promise but I concluded it was problematic for the same reason that variants on engineer or storyteller were flawed, mainly because it is implied what I might do: provide a vision. It should be noted that if your main output is a vision is that you can always blame other people for failing to interpret it correctly if anything fails, this is never the less risky.
Today I have reached a conclusion, I want the title: Technical Philosopher. I need to separate myself from the academic type of philosopher (because that is not well paid) by including the word Technical. This title has the credibility of sounding like a solid academic subject, whilst having no implication of achieving anything, all I would need to do is think but delivering useful thoughts would be a bonus. Unfortunately my current employer does not encourage imagination in job titles but I can carry on dreaming in idle hours.
Disclaimer: These are my idle musing, in the same group as what I would spend my money on if I won the lottery, they are no indicative of dissatisfaction with my job or employer.
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