Keep "Employee" on the profile of SE employees on meta [duplicate]

Question

Currently, SE employees are given diamonds wherever they need them. I agree with Jeff on this to some degree, employees shouldn't be treated any different.

But... on meta, employees are different. They have the power to dole out official responses, and thus we should be able to differentiate between an employee and a normal user. Currently, only some employees have a diamond on MSO (see https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/178809/stevvve, https://meta.stackexchange.com/users/202998/jeremy-tunnell). This makes it confusing, especially when you see official-sounding posts like this one.

Now, giving diamonds to all employees on meta may not be the best solution to this. I don't think all employees want their precious inboxes spammed with all the suspensions that are doled out on meta, and other mod stuff. They won't really need the diamond powers either (though it wouldn't hurt).

So, I propose this:

Similar to how moderators have "Moderator" clearly on their profile

display "employee" on an employee's profile, along with the diamond if they have one. At least on meta.

It would imho be even better to display it on their usercards in some form, but that has already been shot down.

It would be even even better if non-MSO mods had greyed out diamonds, similar to those on the Area51 flair, but that's just me wanting more shiny stuff ;-)

Answer 1

As of 31 July, 2019 all staff have a "Staff" label on their profile pages including all sites, main and meta. It looks a bit different than what you suggested but I think it's pretty cool. We also updated the moderator label.

For more information see: Employee profiles are now marked with a “Staff” indicator

Answer 2

I'd like this. I don't think it should be restricted to Meta, since that would actually make things more complicated. We already have data on employees that identifies them as such, so reading that on all sites would be a lot simpler than just employing it only on Meta Stack Overflow.

I wouldn't call the idea of putting it on the user-card on posts as completely shot down, though. I think just having the word "Employee", beneath either the name or the reputation and badges, that'd probably be the most direct and easiest implementation. We definitely have the space for it, it'd be no more obtrusive than the whole Accept Rate currently is.

Could maybe restrict this latter portion to meta-sites only, since employee status is generally unimportant in main-site Q&A, but I think that there's really no harm in still keeping the title on the profile. We should have it in our About Me section anyway.

Answer 3

I've status-declined this, not because I think it's a bad idea, but because it turns out to be trickier than anticipated. Conceptually, the code would be something like¹:

if user_type = employee
   print 'Employee'
else if user_type = moderator
   print 'Moderator'
...

But we have a lot of employees who never do any moderator-y type things. We'd like the sales team to use the sites exactly as regular users and not draw any special attention to them. So a slightly more complicated rule would be:

if user_type = moderator
   if user_type = employee
      print 'Employee'
   else
      print 'Moderator'
...

However, it turns out that didn't catch an important edge case. To solve that problem we started to think of how to subdivide employees into manual lists and it just stopped being a trivial change.

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Instead, we are going to make sure our "about me" sections have this important information front and center²:

Besides not requiring complicated rules, this scheme allows us to more precisely explain our roles. Since it tends to be most confusing with new hires, editing the profile will be part of our onboarding process.³

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_{1. [My code](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_another_Perl_hacker) would be more like `s/^Moderator$/Employee/ if ($user{employee}); print`. 2. I spent considerable time figuring out how Grace managed to get different text in the User Card than in the Profile. Answer: [``](https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/104810/how-does-the-user-card-popup-work) 3. Presumably right after learning the secret handshake.}