10 Goofiest Job Titles Ever Conceived
Recently Elon Musk decided he hadn’t done enough for his online meme community, so he changed his job title to Technoking of Tesla according to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Not only this but his Chief Financial Officer Zach Kirkhorn had also been bequeathed with the hallowed title of “Master of Coin” like Tesla was some sort of medieval guild.
While Elon is the latest to give himself an objectively dumb job title, he’s certainly not the first. My friend, fresh out of university with some sort of degree in coding would sign off all his emails as “Coder, Professional Ninja”. To this day he is still trying to get his career off the ground. Likewise, writers, in a trumped up effort to make the profession sound even the slightest bit sexy or worthwhile will commonly refer to themselves as Wordsmiths.
In the wild equally cringe titles have cropped up in other industries, such as “Beverage Dissemination Officers” working the bar, or a humble “retail Jedi”, otherwise known as a shop assistant. Creative gigs have the lowest immunity to this sort of trend, take for example the “Wizard of Light Bulb Moments” aka Marketing Director or “Dream Alchemist” (Head of Creative).
From a practical standpoint for customer facing roles, funky job titles can confuse clients, while internally they might provide a bit of a laugh and be good for morale. In the long term, carrying a weird job title outside of its original context onto your CV or Linkedin can hurt future job prospects. Future employers are searching keywords, and they aren’t going to think of googling “Digital Overlord” next time they’re looking for a web admin.
I’m not saying that these titles shouldn’t exist, I’m just saying that if you want to be taken seriously, maybe calm down with your job titles. Or be the second richest man on the planet and be above the opinions of a lowly word-journeyman.
Top 10 Goofy Job Titles
Galactic Viceroy of Research Excellence
A researcher at Microsoft.
Problem Wrangler
Counsellor
Digital Prophet
The title of Marketing Executive David Shing at AOL held
Chick Sexer
Someone who determines the sex of chickens
Direct Mail Demi-God
Direct Mail Manager
Weekend Happiness Concierge
Dribbble’s idea of someone in charge of customer satisfaction
Time Ninja
Human resources coordinator
at Chewy
Security Princess
Security engineer for Google Chrome
Innovation Sherpa
Another innovative title Microsoft is responsible for
Content Hero
Some sort of business content generator