Job Titles Are Out. Now We’re All ‘Members of the Technical Staff.’, tell me about this news in (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/27/business/members-of-technical-staff-artificial-intelligence.html)

The New York Times article explores a growing cultural and structural shift sweeping Silicon Valley and the artificial intelligence industry: the widespread abandonment of traditional corporate ladders and granular job titles (such as Vice President, Director, Product Manager, or Senior/Staff Engineer) in favor of a single, egalitarian titleMember of Technical Staff (MTS).

1. The Revival of a Bell Labs Tradition

The title is not new. It originated in the mid-20th century at AT&T’s legendary Bell Labsand was later adopted by Xerox PARCwhere Nobel laureates, engineers, and even executives shared the title to signal that scientific rigor and technical contribution mattered far more than corporate hierarchy. Frontier AI labs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Perplexity, and teams within Google DeepMind have deliberately revived this convention.

2. Why AI Labs Are Ditching Traditional Titles

• Blurring Lines Between Roles: In frontier AI development, traditional distinctions between pure research scientists, infrastructure engineers, and product managers have largely dissolved. Teams need to pivot rapidly between model training, evaluations, safety, and infrastructure without bureaucratic boundaries or endless renegotiations of scope.

• A Culture of “Everyone Ships”: The flat organizational model is designed to keep technical contributors close to the actual code and models, preventing the emergence of management bloat where status is tied to headcount rather than technical output.

• Defense Against Talent Poaching: In an intensely competitive talent war, standardized titles provide operational opacity. When every engineerfrom a recent hire to a world-class researchershares the exact same title on LinkedIn, it becomes significantly harder for headhunters and rival tech giants to map internal org charts or target specific project leads.

3. C-Suite Leaders “Trading Down”

The article highlights a notable trend: seasoned tech executives and sitting C-suite leaders willingly surrendering prestige titles to become individual contributors with the MTS designation. A prominent example includes Workday’s Chief Technology Officer, Peter Bailis, leaving his executive post at an 18,000-person enterprise software giant to join Anthropic as a Member of Technical Staff. Similar moves have been made by former CTOs and VP-level leaders from across the tech landscape.

4. A Shift in Silicon Valley Status

Historically, career progression in tech meant climbing toward executive management and stepping away from hands-on engineering. The rise of the MTS title marks a reversal: prestige and influence in the AI era are defined by proximity to frontier models and what you build, rather than the length of your title or the number of direct reports you manage. Furthermore, compensation for these rolesfrequently reaching high six- to seven-figure packages with equitymeans moving to an MTS role is anything but a step down.