On 10/10/25 10:54 AM, Christoph Berg wrote:
> Re: Jonathan S. Katz
>> From what I've observed, many organizations have adopted "Distinguished" as
>> the next tier (e.g. "Distinguished Engineer"), and that may help with
>> understanding the progression from "Contributor" => "Major Contributor" =>
>> "Distinguished Contributor" as people would associate that "Distinguished"
>> sounds like someone has had a sustained level of significant contributions
>> for a long time.
>
> I think this would make sense if we were starting from scratch, but
> now the community has had two (or more?) decades to remember that
> "major" means a lot. If we now "promoted" all existing contributors to
> "major" that would be very confusing.
That's a fair point. That said, I'd weigh it against the confusion of
the one-time action of promoting major contributors to "distinguished"
vs. the confusion of parsing the difference between "major" vs.
"significant"/"notable" or similar adjectives, where it's more
challenging to understand the difference.
Jonathan
