At inConcert we don’t have any ranks, we ain’t the fucking army you know?

We all are R&D staff. Of course we have different skills, some people is better at some things than others, and each person has his own inclination towards something, whether it’s math, machine learning or user interface design.

But there’s no rank.

There’s even job descriptions, whether you’re a designer or an engineer, it’s based on the idea proposed by Johanna Rothman, and it states:

• What are you supposed to do
• What skills you need
• What are your deliverables

It serves as a compass when you start to understand what’s important in your position (no sole lickers please)

But there’s no rank.

You can be awesome and delivering solutions across the full stack or you can be struggling with a small subset of the product or technology we happen to be using. (And it will affect how much money you make)

But there’s no rank.

And this is important, because these are times of disease, and we have a disease in town I want to warn you about; it’s called the Badge Hunting disease.

Have you heard about the case of the CEO of his one person company? We used to call that a freelancer! These badge collecting trolls it’s like the World of Warcraft of the Linkedinz, have you seen them? That guy updating his profile every single week; his code passes a test? Test Passing Manager. Helped a colleague? Team Leader. Draw some mockups? Product Manager. Get some flyers printed and mailed? Event co-organizer. Made a website? Entrepreneur.

Are you trying to impress your mother? These guys are more worried about the looks than about getting something done, and you should avoid them like the plague.

I’m not advocating against having specific roles when a company grows into a stage of needing them, hey, I even think some badges you can earn, but if you deserve it I don’t think you really care about them.

Show me what you’ve built, all the rest is bullshit.

And that’s why we have no ranks, if you want a badge go play some WoW.