>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.

Thanks for the lowdown, Ken. I hear what you're saying, as the same holds true here. For example, I am officially Senior Mathematical Statistician in title in my office (that was simply the quickest way to get me my last major upgrade), but in fact, I'm virtually 100% IT in actual duties. People that work for me are better and more-qualified statisticians than I am, in truth. (None of the Math Stats visit the UT AFAIK, so I think I can say that without getting ribbed about it, and I don't care if any IT people here see it, they already know what I do.)

We have a bunch of aberrations and slightly misleading titles like this, and we don't worry much about it, so long as everything works, and everyone's happy with the way things work. It's probably not very unusual at all.