>Besides, when we want to give someone a nice promotion around here because they're really good people we want to be sure to retain, and there's no official vacancy, etc., we sometimes just create a new title & position to get someone a nice promotion & raise...even if the new title is sort of weird sometimes :-)
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>Even in the gov't we can get away with that, if everyone's on-board with the promotion.

In most cases at Microsoft, promotions, raises, etc. are done totally independent of title changes. Robert Green's for the past several years was Lead VS Product Manager, and for the past year he was working on Office Tools for Visual Studio (the tools that allow you to use VS for Office 2003 programming in .NET). That title didn't fully reflect his role (ie Office Tools for VS Product Manager), but titles do not mean that much at Microsoft. As of today, Robert Green has a new role at Microsoft, in the VB group as a program manager in charge of the VB team's community efforts. Now is how title is not VB Community Manager, but that is what he is, so again the title does not fully reflect the role, which doesn't really matter.