Real or fake job titles

Titles instead of raises

91% of US workers believe a new title is how employers avoid giving a raise. Congratulations on the promotion. The salary will be in touch, and in the meantime the announcement can go out in LinkedIn speak.

Titles work as bait for new hires too. In 2023, 54% of organizations were using job titles to attract talent, a 35% jump from 2018. Rewrite a data analyst ad for a data cowboy and the spreadsheets stay exactly the same.

Titles people give themselves

Real, in this game, means an employer used the title. That bar is lower than it sounds, because some titles start with the employee. The self-issued promotion goes like this. You start carrying what the managers carry, ask for the vest that goes with it, and answer questions under a title you made up. Sooner or later someone asks where your office is and finds you one. Once payroll catches up, the title counts.

For a title without the vest, the job title generator draws one at random, with the job spelled out underneath.

Scoring real or fake job titles

A right answer is worth 100 points. Each right answer after the first in an unbroken run is worth 20 more than the one before. The third in a row scores 140 and the tenth scores 280. A wrong answer ends the run. Ten from ten is 1,900.

Everyone gets the same ten titles on the same day, and 4 to 6 of them are real. The fakes copy the patterns of real funny job titles. There’s a Chief of something small, a royal rank, and a craft word like wrangler or artist stuck on a desk job.

Your best daily score and your streak of days played stay in this browser. A practice set draws ten titles at random and changes neither.