After spending much of my life in the enterprise before moving into entrepreneurship and startup world I realized very quickly that titles and the formalities of position really mattered.
It’s what makes “climbing the corporate ladder” even possible as there are rungs to walk up and, if you’re talented and lucky enough, to jump perhaps.
Your title mattered and it established not just your position within the company – it established a baseline of your role and responsibilities, your pay grade, your access to resources and human capital, you’re ability to build relational equity, and even politicking. Your title preceded you everywhere which is why I really hate(d) the enterprise.
Now, titles mean very little to me and my gut reaction when I hear someone say “Hi, I’m the CEO of XYZ Company.” I want to instantly dismiss them. This has more to do with me than anything else but it’s still the honest truth.
But WordPress has successfully begun to invade the enterprise. It started very slowly, even in black box projects that I lead while I worked as an engineer at Dell, Inc. There was an “extra” local unused server under my colleagues desk and we booted up an internal WordPress blog to help communicate development project details beyond the 4 walls of our silo’d organization.
We had essentially detached the breaks between internal organizations and changed the communication model. That was the outcause and people loved it and we expanded our local solution laterally across more than a few organizations.
But this was just a small part of the coming invasion. Introducing new software to the enterprise is easy – I did it 7 years ago. But getting the enterprise to accept it as legitimate is something entirely different (and more significant).
You see, I still retained my title as Software Engineer – it would take me 7 long years before I ever saw a real and legitimate WordPress Software Engineer position in the enterprise, in big business, or even the Fortune 1,000.
And it’s happening. For example, today we received in our new Job Board a listing from Bloomberg, which is a Fortune 1,000 company, for a job and role titled WordPress Developer, Consultant.
Yes, you read that right: WordPress Developer as an official job title and role. That’s freakin’ nutso.
If I was in the job market and looking for a full-time role it would be amazing to hold that title and position in a legit Fortune company. Just think about that for a moment.
Times are changing and if you know what it’s like to work in big business and the enterprise then you know that titles, corporate structures, and culture take a long time to change but WordPress has made landfall and I think it’s here to stay.
Well done WordPress; you’re changing the world.
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