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12.4 — Degrees, Titles, Honours and Job Names Decoded
The labels people carry are mostly medieval, mostly borrowed, and almost never mean what they appear to.
Degrees
What is a PhD, and why is it called that?
Doctor of Philosophy, and the word philosophy is being used in its original sense — love of wisdom, meaning systematic enquiry of any kind. A PhD in chemistry, history or computer science is a doctorate of philosophy because the medieval university divided knowledge into theology, law, medicine and philosophy, where philosophy meant everything else.
What it certifies is not depth of knowledge but capacity to produce new knowledge. The requirement is an original contribution — something nobody knew before, defended in front of examiners who will attack it. A taught degree tests whether you learned what is known; a doctorate tests whether you can add to it.
It is not a higher version of a master's. A BTech, MTech or MSc are taught qualifications with courses, examinations and a syllabus. A PhD has no syllabus. Typical duration is three to seven years, most of it unstructured, and the completion rate in many fields is well under 70 per cent.
The word doctor is older than the medical use. It comes from Latin docere, to teach, and originally meant somebody licensed to teach in a university. Physicians acquired the title later, and in Britain surgeons pointedly revert to Mr, Ms or Miss after qualifying — a survival of the old distinction between physicians, who were university-educated, and surgeons, who were craftsmen apprenticed through the barbers' guild. The apparent demotion is a claim to seniority.
What is the actual hierarchy of degrees?
Bachelor's — the first degree, typically three to four years. The name comes from medieval Latin baccalaureus, a junior member of a guild, and the folk etymology from bacca lauri, laurel berry, is decorative rather than real.
Master's — a second cycle, one to two years, from Latin magister, teacher. Historically the master's was the teaching qualification and the doctorate an honorific; they have effectively swapped places.
Doctorate — the research degree. The PhD is the standard research doctorate; professional doctorates such as MD, JD, EdD or DBA are different things in different countries, which causes confusion. In the United States an MD is a first professional degree; in Britain and India an MBBS is the first medical degree and an MD is a postgraduate specialisation.
Habilitation exists in Germany, France, Poland and elsewhere as a further qualification beyond the doctorate, required to hold a full professorship.
And an honorary doctorate is not a degree. It is an award, carries no examination, and by convention the holder does not use the title doctor professionally — a convention that is broken constantly.
What is a professor, and why does it mean different things?
In Britain, India and much of the Commonwealth, professor is the most senior academic rank, held by a minority of academics, with lecturer, senior lecturer, reader and associate professor below it.
In the United States, professor is the general term for anybody teaching at a university, with the actual ranks being assistant professor, associate professor and full professor.
So an American calling a junior academic "Professor" is being accurate, and a British academic being called professor without holding the chair is being over-promoted. It is the single most common source of academic title confusion between the two systems.
Tenure is a permanent appointment that can only be terminated for serious cause, awarded after a probationary period of several years. Its stated purpose is academic freedom — the ability to research and say unpopular things without being dismissed — and its critics argue it also protects unproductive people indefinitely. Both are true.
Job titles
What does a Developer Advocate actually do?
A real job, at real salaries, and it is not marketing with a technical name — though the boundary is genuinely contested.
The job exists because developers do not respond to advertising. A company selling a cloud platform, an API or a database cannot persuade engineers to adopt it through campaigns; engineers evaluate by trying things, reading documentation and asking peers. So the company employs engineers to be useful in public.
The work, concretely: writing technical documentation and tutorials, building sample applications, speaking at conferences, answering questions in forums and issue trackers, running workshops, and producing videos.
And the half that matters more: carrying feedback inward. An advocate spends their time with people using the product badly, hitting bugs and abandoning it, and is expected to report that to the engineering and product teams. A good advocacy function is a listening post; a bad one is a speaking tour.
Hiring requires genuine technical ability plus communication. Companies hire from engineering more often than from marketing, because an audience of engineers identifies a non-practitioner within minutes. A typical route in is having built something, written about it publicly, and spoken about it — which means the portfolio is the application.
Reporting lines vary and tell you what the company thinks the job is: under engineering, under product, under marketing, or as its own function. The pay is typically comparable to a mid or senior engineer at the same company, sometimes with a travel load that is the main cost of the role.
Related titles: Developer Relations as the umbrella, Developer Experience for the more product-facing version, and Technical Evangelist, an older name that fell out of favour because it sounded like preaching.
What do the other opaque job titles mean?
Solutions Architect: works with a customer to design how a product will be used in their environment. Pre-sales technical work.
Site Reliability Engineer: an engineer responsible for the reliability of a running system, applying software engineering to operations. Originated at Google, and the defining idea is the error budget — a system is allowed a specified amount of unreliability, and if it is under budget, teams should ship faster rather than gold-plate.
Product Manager: decides what gets built and why, and generally has no authority over the people who build it. The standing joke is that it is responsibility without power, and the skill is entirely in prioritisation and persuasion.
Chief of Staff: an executive's operational deputy. Principal Engineer / Distinguished Engineer / Fellow: senior individual-contributor ranks that exist so that engineers can be promoted without being made managers, which is one of the more useful ideas in the industry.
Growth, Full-Stack, DevOps and Data Scientist are all titles whose meanings vary so widely between companies that the job description is the only reliable guide.
Honours and certifications
What is Credly, and why do companies use it?
A platform for digital badges — cryptographically verifiable records of a certification or achievement.
The problem it solves is verification. A line on a CV claiming a certification is unverifiable without contacting the issuer, and forged certificates are common enough to matter. A digital badge is a data object issued by the awarding body, containing what was awarded, to whom, when, the criteria met, and a link back to the issuer's record — so anybody receiving it can confirm it independently.
Standards exist for this, principally Open Badges, and the format is deliberately portable so a badge can be displayed on a professional profile while remaining checkable.
Why the large certification bodies adopted it: AWS, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM and others issue enormous numbers of certifications, and each one needs a lifecycle — issue, expiry, renewal, revocation. A badge platform handles all of that, and it gives the issuer analytics on where their certifications are being displayed and how they are being used in hiring, which is commercially valuable.
Certifications also expire deliberately, usually every two to three years, because the products change. That is a real technical reason and it is also a recurring revenue model, and both explanations are correct.
What are national honours, and how do they work?
Most countries have a system of state awards for civilian achievement, and they are political instruments as well as recognitions.
India has the Bharat Ratna at the top, then Padma Vibhushan, Padma Bhushan and Padma Shri. Nominations are open to the public, and there is a formal committee, but the final decision is governmental. Several people have declined them, and the awards have been criticised for lobbying and for their distribution across fields and regions.
The United Kingdom has an honours system with knighthoods, and the OBE, MBE and CBE — where the "British Empire" in the name has led several recipients, particularly of Caribbean and South Asian background, to decline on principle.
France has the Légion d'honneur, established by Napoleon in 1802, explicitly designed as a merit-based alternative to hereditary nobility.
The pattern across all of them: an honours system is a state's low-cost way of directing prestige, and what gets honoured is a reasonable index of what a government wants associated with itself.
Why do certain professions wear specific clothing?
Because each is a survival of a working uniform whose function has gone.
Academic gowns descend from medieval clerical dress, when universities were church institutions and students were in minor orders. The gown was ordinary clothing for a cold unheated hall. The hood was a genuine hood, and it became a draped ornament as hats replaced it. The colour coding by discipline is a much later formalisation, largely nineteenth and twentieth century, and it differs by country.
Judicial wigs and robes in Britain date from seventeenth-century court fashion, when wigs were ordinary formal dress. Everyone else stopped wearing them and the courts did not. They have been abolished for most civil cases in England since 2008 and retained for criminal ones, and the argument for keeping them is anonymity and the impersonality of the office rather than tradition.
The white coat in medicine is late nineteenth century and marks a specific historical moment: doctors adopted it as medicine became scientific, borrowing the authority of the laboratory. Before that, physicians wore black, as befitted a profession that mostly attended deaths.
The chef's toque is attributed to Marie-Antoine Carême in the early nineteenth century, and the folded pleats are sometimes said to number a hundred, one for each way of cooking an egg, which is almost certainly a later invention.
What comes next
The final page of this volume collects everything that did not fit anywhere else — the firsts, the lasts, and the leftover marvels.