Chief Beer Officer

Before we go for the weekend let's finish with the obligatory C-title on Friday: Chief Beer Officer -- I heard first about it on NPR (check here) and the job really encompasses getting paid to drink beer. From the article: "You read that right. It's an actual job. The Four Points by Sheraton hotels chain created the position because it wants to market so-called craft beers as one of its specialties."

And on that note get out for an happy hour and do some networking:-)

Director of Skunk Works

From the announcement e-mail:

"The purpose of this group is to prototype new technology that’s going to support our products and initiatives. It will be a small team of a programmer, an artist and a few designers. They’ll be working on special projects that we’ll launch in conjunction with new products, or big new initiatives. The Director of Skunk Works is going to be reporting to the CEO, and just about every group within the company is going to be working with Skunkworks in some capacity or another. Why the name? Well… the idea is to keep it small and focused on new ideas that will help look towards the future in this business and lead the pack, not follow other people’s ideas."


Leaving the obvious issues with institutionalizing skunk works aside (is it still skunk works if it's official?) this clearly is a dream job and very smart to encourage for every company. For instance the Miata convertible was a product of skunk works and Motorola's Razr was developed in a skunk work fashion -- I never heard of failed skunk works projects so it must always lead to great results(?). Let's turn everyhting in skunk works then -- be all skunk workers...

Diversity Coordinator

A public university is always a good source for strange positions. To make things more interesting public institutions give you two titles: a payroll title to determine your pay and a more fancy one to put on your business card. Diversity coordinator is the later one and from what I have been told the major goal is to promote growth of historically underrepresented populations among campus groups which is kind of hilarious.

The complete description from the web site:

1. Coordinate programs and initiatives promoting growth of historically underrepresented populations among campus groups and student organizations, including the development and implementation of a strategic plan for diversity in line with the Office of the President’s strategic plan to increase diversity among the UCSD graduate student population.
2. Serve as a GSA representative to the UCSD Diversity Council or appoint, subject to GSAUCSD Council approval, a replacement.
3. Advise the VP Internal on the appointment of GSAUCSD representatives, subject to GSAUCSD Council approval, to diversity committees: Affirmative Action and Diversity Committee of the Academic Senate, Chancellor's Advisory Committee on Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Issues, Chancellor's Advisory Committee on the Status of Women, and Women's Center Advisory Board.
4. Work to promote diversity in the body of students participating in GSA and sponsored events including the All-Grad Symposium and the annual statewide Students of Color Conference.
5. Organize an annual meeting between the diversity coordinators of each department and OGS staff to share best practices of recruitment and retention of minority students.

Web Urbanist

I ran across this the other day and from their web site: "from urban design to subversive art and strange architecture. We scour the net to find neat new stuff then boil that information down and pack it into an article with relevant images and links, as exhaustive as we can manage on a single subject area. Our team is comprised of web designers, bloggers, architects and other curious urbanists."

Chief Disambiguator

Friday is the day of C-level titles and the Chief Disambiguator is one if not the most important function in any corporation. With all the ambigious information coming in from business intelligence, strategy consultants, customers -- there has to be somebody to paint a coherent picture of the situation and make the right decision. Unfortunately a lot of people int his job rely solely on their gut to make the calls -- not a good basis for disambiguating and you see the results daily in the news.

In a related function each software project needs a chief disambiguator who dissects ambiguous definitions in the specification and makes the right calls what the customer actually meant (a novel concept asks for actually asking the customer). Given that roughly 50% of software projects fail it seems that disambiguator there also rely to much on their gut than on reality -- or could easily be replaced by flipping a coin with the same outcome.

In the financial industry Chief Disambiguators are often called Chief Risk Officer or Chief Economist - Ben Bernanke or Helicopter Ben for his friends for instance is a classical example of a chief disambiguator: should he raise interest rates, keep them the same, or lower them. There are reports and number who support either direction...

Because we only report on titles each workday we will be out until Tuesday.

Code Archaeologist

It is absolutely no coincidence that we are looking at that title the same day as the new Indiana Jones starts. Similarly to the man with the whip chasing cradles and skulls over all seven continents a code archaeologist is chasing source code over all seven source repositories - always in a race against time and exposed to the treacherous source lines of past civilizations. Changing a character here can make the whole temple ahem program explode with our archaeologist stuck in the middle. Sometimes literacy in ancient languages (Cobol comes to mind) is as necessary as Egyptian hieroglyphs. Some code archaeologists had some success with using mythical weapons like unit testing and extreme programming. However as most archaeologist in real life are still looking for the holy grail our code archaeologist is still searching, too.

Titles describing similar functions are legacy code explorer, Cobol developer, deep code diver, and of course code gerontologist or proctologist.

Computational Theologist

I couldn't believe it when I fist saw this title at http://blogs.sun.com/gbracha/resource/JAOO2005.pdf -- what does a computational theologist do? Figure out if god is a computer?

Here is how Gilead, now a computational theologist emeritus, describes it himself:

I have been asked this question so many times, I finally gave up and decided to post an explanation on my web page.

I was forced to invent the term Computational Theologist because I had to come up with a title to put on my business card. The usual titles are unspeakably boring, and non-descriptive as well.

Computational Theology is a term I invented to describe my work on the specifications of the JavaTM programming language and the JavaTM virtual machine. Initially, my work was focused on interpretation of existing specifications. This interpretive work had a legalistic, even talmudic flavor, and these specifications are, so to speak, the "holy books" of the Java platform. Hence the analogy with theology.

To be completely accurate, I should have billed myself as a Computational Theologian rather than as a Computational Theologist.

However, I find the word theologian quite irregular. How many biologians, geologians or philologians do you know? Computational theology is very much concerned with preventing this kind of irregularity, which is so characteristic of natural language, from spreading in computing systems, especially programming languages. So I opted for the more regular expression, Computational Theologist.

Recently, I discovered that people are in fact using the term Computational Theology seriously. They mean a theology based on the model of computation. You can find out more using your favorite search engine.

I no longer work for Sun, so I’m now Computational Theologist Emeritus

(Source: http://bracha.org/Site/Theology.html)