It is so customers can feel good about working with a VP for their personalized service.
Hierarchy theater.
this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2024
21 points (100.0% liked)
hmmm
7109 readers
74 users here now
For things that are "hmmm".
Rule 1: All post titles except for meta posts should be just plain "hmmm" and nothing else, no emotes, no capitalisation, no extending it to "hmmmm" etc.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Always remember to ask a VP "how many people report to you?" If they say none, then they aren't a VP just sparkling wage slave.
I had 100 people reporting to me as a VP in a global bank. It's still nothing. It's all about relative size.
100 people in a company of 1000? Real VP.
100 people out of 100k? Middle manager.
In some industries you can be a supervisor with 100 reports. Job titles are so asynchronized even in similar types of companies that they're virtually meaningless without company specific context.
That just reminded me of something I hated about a large consulting firm I used to work for. When doing the "laddering" (aka ranking people for promotions and raises), we had to justify why people deserved to be ranked higher than everyone else.
The people in that meeting were soooo full of shit. You'd have people claiming that their brand new analyst fresh out of college was managing a team of 100 people. Meanwhile I'm like "my new guy wrote some good test scripts and didn't say anything dumb in front of the client." Just couldn't compete with all that BS.
Very very much a thing in Finance, with tiers of VP too (Assistant VP, VP, Senior VP). Even for people doing internal support, it makes the internal "customer" feel good.
It was a learning experience when I was told not to prioritize anyone below SVP.
It's often also used as a compensation aid when someone has maxed out their pay band or title but there isn't a management slot open or they don't want to do management. My team doesn't have titles for team leads, but all our "unofficial" ones have at least an "Assistant" VP title.
“Assistant VP” or “Assistant to the VP”? lol
I will just leave this little nugget of applicable wisdom from Napoleon Bonaparte:
A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.
I got so mad at my job recently.
I'm a dept lead. But the one who gives raises is two levels above me. And my teammate went to HR fully expecting to get a promotion, which they gave to her but without the salary. I raised a shit storm, and they said, "nothing we can do." Which is BS.
I pulled her aside and told her to work less, and been pushing for her to get more raises so she meets the minimum baseline salary for her role.
It's a carry over from all the bank mergers from the 80s (and probably earlier). You never want to cut someone's title, so when dinky 10-branch bank gets bought by JP Morgan, the VP just stays a VP even though you can't possibly make them the second-most-powerful person at JP Morgan. With enough mergers you get a critical mass and you have to create a structure where all the current VPs and everyone around their stature get the title but it officially loses any meaning.
Tldr I blame the Savings and Loan crisis