Differentiate between employees and moderators [duplicate]

Question

My understanding of who has diamonds:

• All moderators have diamonds on the sites they moderate and their respective meta
• Stack Exchange employees have diamonds everywhere they're needed

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Right now, there are a lot of new diamond moderators across the network, with more being added in the near future.

Stack Exchange has also been doing a lot of hiring lately, which means there are a lot of newish ex officio diamond moderators as well.

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I think it would be helpful if there was a way to differentiate between moderators and employees across the SE sites.

A couple of examples of where it would have been helpful:

• On betas, right after opening: users see people with diamonds and wonder where these moderators came from—it would be clearer if they were easily identified as employees.
• On MSO, when (for instance) someone responds to a feature request. It's useful to know if that response is from, say, the programmer who's currently working on that exact code versus a volunteer mod who has an opinion that something is/isn't/will never happen.

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Suggested solution:
Give employees a different symbol.

Possiblilities:

♢
❖
◇
◆
▰
∆
∇
⍚
␎
◈
♠
♣
♥

Suggested but unusable:

⧗
⧱
⸭
⟐
⧓
⧗
⧫
⧱
⧎
⎆
⎏
⎐
⎑
⎒
⬙
⬘
⬗
⬖

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Misc thoughts:

• The super-coolest kids on the block would be those with both symbols.
• Someone would need to verify that there are no users on any site whose user name ends with the new symbol (and keep people from changing their user name to have it).
• While these symbols are all valid Unicode characters, some of them might not be visible on all browsers (IE, I'm looking at you…). Those that aren't visible on all supported browsers should be ruled out.

Answer 1

I kind of agree with badp's answer here -- we are running alongside you, not above you.

We strive mightily to put the very same tools that we have as moderators, in the hands of the community moderators. Obviously there are some unavoidable differences (mostly based on "kind of dangerous even for us developers"), but the general philosophy is this:

Therefore, at least in principle, there should be very little difference between my actions and another community moderator's actions.

And I think the visual indicators should echo this sentiment.

Answer 2

-1. While this proposal makes logical sense, it is harmful to the community. The last thing SEs need is more of the "we site vs you owners" feeling. Most of the time, this difference is irrelevant and I'm glad that it is that way.