If you can’t fill a role, the real requirements and job definition will change. It’s instructive to look at what’s happened to field engineering. When I started out in the mid nineties, an SE (sales or solutions engineer) was responsible for making the customer successful from the first meeting to the (hopefully never occuring) last meeting. Sure I gave demos, but I also recommended architecture, supported customers, and even wrote code. People who could do that weren’t as common or cheap as people who could deliver a scripted demo. So vendor companies added a technical account manager or customer success manager role, responsible for making the customer successful from first meeting to last meeting. People who could do that weren’t as common or cheap as people who could route tickets through engineering. So companies have added a forward deployed engineer, responsible for… you guessed it. But meanwhile, those roles weren’t supposed to be part of sales engineering anymore, so the definition and pay range of SE shrank at those companies — SE’s are supposed to win new opportunities, CSE’s win the renewals, and TAMs or FDE’s glue it all together. Role 1 is hard, so we split out some of it to Role 2. Now there’s too many cooks in the kitchen and it’s even harder to get the job done, so we add Role 3.
We can also apply that story shape to “I am a technical expert who makes my development team successful”. Coordination costs are kind of a problem, it turns out, and someone needs to be in a position to help. They have to understand what everyone’s doing in their team and in other teams, communicate that understanding proactively and reactively, and help make decisions about how things should be done. That used to be the engineering manager’s job, then it became a staff or principal engineer’s job, and now I sense a new title is ready to be born. You see Bob has been here four years and he does good work and we don’t want to lose him, so he needs a promotion and staff is the next title on the list, so now he’s staff, whether he fits the criteria or not, but he’s still not really a people person. Of course your company might spell staff principal, or even principle (As an English major, I share a disappointed sigh).
Is this describing role decay or title inflation? Why not both? There is another way to observe the problematic outcome, and that is to decrease the role’s status. Both examples I gave earlier are high status roles in which the requirements for the role gradually loosened, but another path to resolve complexity challenges is to gradually increase the requirements for a low status role. We need look no further than teachers. When I graduated from college, teaching was the obvious path for people with my degree. It would require another year or two of school to get a credential and an ongoing week per year of CPE (continuing professional education) to land a solidly lower class income. Those basic requirements are unchanged from what I remember in the late 90’s, but this list of tasks is markedly worsened by the addition of software tools. Note that list doesn’t include physical and psychological safety support, which are both far more demanding than they were thirty years ago. The technology equivalent of this is to pile more work onto product managers, engineering managers, and the field. My friends in the medical community describe similar effects for nursing.
The number of people able and willing to do complex work is finite, and they often command higher pay. But roles have to be filled as the org grows, and budget pressure is what it is… so the roles get filled and the definition of the role gradually loosens as the people in the roles are less capable of doing the work.
AI makes everything worse of course, because resumes and test outcomes are identically meaningless now and hiring is harder than ever. Many hiring managers are falling back to exclusive personal networks for sourcing, which again reduces the pool of qualified candidates for a role. Writ large, hiring lots of underqualified candidates produces another layoff cycle, while insisting on qualified candidates means going without for months on end, per role. Managers fill the roles with less capable people, telling themselves they can train the candidate up to par. However, daily pressures are what they are, so less critical tasks don’t get done and truly critical tasks become someone else’s glue work. Maybe a stable status quo is found where other teams take on some of the role, or some of the complex aspects are just done poorly, or not at all. It’s a truism that glue work is undervalued until some level of crisis is achieved. That crisis is the point in an e-staff meeting when we hear “this is an unreasonable ask, my team can’t possibly do this task that is the entire reason the team exists.”
One last note: adding roles to fulfill requirements is one direction of the pendulum, but the other is to reduce roles and push the requirements back onto the remaining roles. The reason for pendulum swings can look like fashion, but finance is a big effect: the SE-does-it-all model of the nineties put a lot of cost into COGS (Cost Of Goods Sold) while post-sales roles can sit elsewhere. Layoffs are a typical way to move this pendulum, but the other way it happens is startups. Every startup-to-scaleup story is an experimentation opportunity. Still, all these companies have to hire and that means participating in the market of titles and pay ranges; you can’t stretch the definition too hard or you won’t be able to easily hire for it.
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