Why do startups tend to offer fashionable “cool” job title names? Is it sane?

If you are a startup, and money is tight, you need to find another incentive to give your employees. Giving equity is expensive. Making them feel good for a low cost is very important, because you are competing with all the established businesses that can hire them.

By giving a "cool" job title, you give a person the sense that it is a fun place to work and that you value them enough to put the needed thought into their job title. You can either go with vice president for PHP development or PHP Guru. Since programmers usually look for the fun title rather then the more professional career related title, it is more common, but both are used in the industry. Since this is probably the cheapest way to compensate your employees, it makes sense it would be a common practice.

I think that the problem is that such titles are funny the first time, but then a bunch of other people start using it, and it gets old very fast. Especially when recruiters think it'll higher their chances. My 2c though.

Why do startups offer those goofy titles? When a startup doesn't have the VC money to burn for highly qualified mature (like in ability to think and not age) people, their only choice is a certain juvenile demographic, that is gullible and love when they are fed BS and their fragile egos are stroked. As one of the CEOs I had pleasure working with used to call it: "you back up a school bus to your problem". Those "ninjas" and "rockstars" are willing to take much less pay, if you give them either an overinflated title or one that appeals to their lack of maturity.

I personally do not subscribe to that philosophy and never did (or ever will) build business culture like that. If you don't have the VC money, create an environment and culture that vastly improves their resumes. Yes, it is much harder to figure out how to help your employees get better every day than just feed them BS.

See my article on the subject:How a foosball table can kill your startup – part two

Some VC's tend to frown on liberal title giving. Here is some advice of titles to avoid. Yes, it's nice / no cost to give big titles, but (if) when growth comes, those same people will not be so happy when their "position" is offered to another.

Red Hat, for example, had no titles until they grew to 100 employees. President & Founder works for most smaller groups.

Motivation is salary that costs you nothing. You still need to pay some money though. :-)

Its more about getting geek coders who are dedicated and are always in code development mode and really not care on moving to management. This is my experience.

I think it is all because it sounded cool to some people.

Personally I wouldn't want to be given a title like that. If the startup fails, you can't be looking for a job in Accenture saying you were once the "Javascript Assassin".

Give them proper professional titles.