Fintech Explainer: Anti-Patterns and Job Titles

This article is about the anti-pattern** that is the corporate fintech job title mess...

Let's start with a lightly anonymised example.  A fintech startup of 2019 vintage, a sample of the job titles:

CEO

Executive Chairman

Managing Director

CFO

Global Head of Customer Experience

CTO

Lead Developer, CX

Senior Director

VP of Product

Product Manager

Managing Director Principal

Director

Global Head, Network Engineering

The company has around 30 staff on LinkedIn, the 13 shown above are representative of the 27.  The remaining three are clearly junior staff members - associate, junior developer and an intern. Sure there cannot be 90% management and 10% doers? This must indicate a firm with a severe case of job title inflation...

Yet - how can a start-up work if everyone is already using big company job titles and job title inflation?  This is an anti-pattern.  Start-ups with big company corporate structures - how many of them lead to a success story?

Another organisation with a defective job title system...


** Software developers have a term in common usage - a pattern.  This is described by wikipedia thus:

In software engineering, a software design pattern is a general, reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem within a given context in software design. It is not a finished design that can be transformed directly into source or machine code. Rather, it is a description or template for how to solve a problem that can be used in many different situations. Design patterns are formalized best practices that the programmer can use to solve common problems when designing an application or system.

The opposite is the anti-pattern, wikipedia states this as being:

...a common response to a recurring problem that is usually ineffective and risks being highly counterproductive.

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