Actually it bothers me because I am the "CTO" of a 3-people company - when we started, I'd have preferred less glamorous titles, but my partners saw an advantage in using standard terminology to clearly separate our roles...

So no social policing - it just stirred some latent doubts about my current title :)

Of course in the end it matters little - this kind of silly discussion is good for a working Sunday afternoon. It's not like we can do anything to stop people from bandwagoning on the cool titles of this week...

Cordially, Ninja Pirate Space Robot Guru Software Proactive Artist Manager

PG tweeted[1] about this yesterday:

I have misgivings about the tendency to make "founder" a title rather than a reference to a historical fact.

[1] https://twitter.com/paulg/status/526207483920932865

I'm not sure it's about policing social status. To me, calling yourself "CEO" of a tiny startup reeks of self-aggrandizement, which is the sort of attitude that rubs me the wrong way.

You might not be connecting the dots here. The concern or even attention to "self-aggrandizement" is itself a form of social status policing. That's literally what the term means.

Maybe we have read "social status policing" to mean completely different things. To me, that suggests caring a lot about status, and worrying a lot about people laying claim to more status than what they're due. My issue here is with people turning status, either deserved or otherwise, into a bigger thing than it is.

Social status is only very rarely material to any given conversation, so I do care when people feel the need to bring it up, and when they feel the need to give themselves pompous titles, because they're signalling to me that they do care about status, and they're going to make it an issue in our dealings.

Aren't you also signalling that you care a lot about status by complaining about it? Usually when people actually don't care about something, they just make note of the fact that somebody else does and slightly alter their dealings with that person to get a more favorable outcome. An argument isn't a favorable outcome; negotiating more of something you do care about (like equity, or influence, or effort on their part) in exchange for something they care about (like titles) is.