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At 01:51 AM 8/11/01 -0700, Andrew responded:
>> To sum up, IMHO job title directly affects compensation and opportunity,
>> both present and future. So by God yes I do attach importance to it!
>
>Yes...some places are more interested in titles than actual skill.
>However, I would not want to work at such a place.
>
>I don't think I need to tell you that skill and capability have NOTHING
>whatsoever to do with title or pay. To think otherwise is truly nieve.
>
Both Andrew's and the other poster's positions are to the point, but are
dependent on context.
The relationships, I think, are between size and titles: the larger the
organization, the larger the burocracy has to be; and, the larger the
burocracy, the more important the titles will be. A larger organization
needs more coordination, more management, so more burocracy. Of course,
the relationship is direct but not linear.
(To be sure as Andrew often maintains, there can be too much mgmt, or too
little; it can be done well or badly, but that is true in any organization
no matter how large or small.)
In this connection, a part of the movement to improve public schools also
recognizes that the key issue, besides funding, is size. The smaller the
public school, the better it can (not necessarily will) serve its students.
That is because all our children are unique, and make different demands,
and small groups can adapt to changing demands more easily than large ones.
Mutatis mutandis, the same is true in technical writing organizations. I
think anyone with successful experience in both small and large companies
will agree that the way to make it in a larger burocracy is to create a
small group around yourself, a team (formal or informal), within which the
primary concern is to get a reputation for good work done (a la Andrew),
and at the same time to recognize (like the first poster) the importance of
your title(and those of your colleagues) within the larger burocracy. It
would be nice to only have to worry about yourself and the people
immediately around you, but life is not always that simple: there is the
grand bourgeois, and the petty.
BTW, this strategy which most people know from work, also works in schools:
create a small school for your child within the large school (that's the
sinister truth behind the effective "honors" programs in our current
malfunctioning schools).
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