Real or fake job titles

Real or fake job titles, six of them every day. Some are on government lists of real jobs, some were used by Google or Tesla, and some we made up.

Six job titles. Call each one real or fake.

Standard issue. Two to four are real.

Standard issue. Two to four are real. Practice: no slices, no best.

How to play real or fake job titles

Each round has six job titles, 2 to 4 of them real. The titles come up one at a time, each on a business card.

Press the Real button if you think the title is real, or Fake if you think we made it up. A wrong answer scores nothing, and your run starts again.

How the fakes are made

Our fakes borrow these patterns from real funny job titles.

A Chief of something small, or a royal rank.
A craft word like wrangler or artist stuck on a desk job.
An old trade word on the wrong material, like Biscuit Fettler. Fettling is foundry work. Real mill and pottery jobs already sound like two words picked at random.
A modern title one word off a real one, like Head of Vibe Checks. Canva’s Head of Vibe is the real one.

Every fake is then checked against three official lists of UK and US job titles, and dropped if one of them has it.

Good to know

Real here means an employer used the title or a government list of jobs carries it.
A few titles score either answer, because their own source says they aren’t real titles. The game still counts them as real.
In the Know-it-all round, a coworker makes a call on each title before you answer. Four of the six calls are right.
The game has no clock, so speed earns nothing.

How the real or fake job titles game scores

Each right answer in an unbroken run is worth more than the one before.

What you do	Points
Right answer	100
Each right answer after the first in a run	20 more than the one before
Third right answer in a row	140
Sixth right answer in a row	200
Wrong answer	0, and the run starts again
Title inflation round	50 a right answer, plus 40 for each one before it, so the sixth in a row scores 250

The best possible score is 900: six from six, in any round.

Daily and solo rounds

The six titles of the day are the same for every player. If you missed yesterday’s six titles, press Play yesterday’s round to get them back. A replay sets no best score.

Job title inflation

Titles instead of raises

91% of US workers think a new title is how employers get out of giving a raise. In 2023, 54% of employers were using job titles to attract talent, a 35% jump from 2018.

Titles people give themselves

Some people make up their own title. David Shing called himself Digital Prophet at AOL, and Elon Musk named himself Technoking of Tesla in a filing with the SEC. In this game, a title like that counts as real only once an employer uses it. AOL and Tesla both did.

Questions about real and fake job titles

How do you play real or fake job titles?

Six job titles come up a day, one at a time on a business card, and you press Real or Fake for each. Two to four of the six are real. A wrong answer scores nothing and starts your run again.

What counts as a real job title?

A title an employer has used, or one a government list of jobs carries. Every fake here was run past three official UK and US job lists, and any title they carried was dropped.

Was Technoking a real job title?

Yes. Tesla used it in a 2021 SEC filing, which named Elon Musk Technoking of Tesla and its finance chief Master of Coin. In this game, both count as real because an employer used them.

What is job title inflation?

A grander title given instead of a raise or a real promotion. In one survey, nearly 4 in 10 US workers said they had moved up a title with no raise to go with it.

Sources

The 131 sources behind this page