Source: have been that person.
On the hiring side, everyone knows that titles only indicate relative seniority within a company. Interviewers must actually interview candidates to determine what their role was, how experienced they are, and other factors.
It can be a warning flag, however, if a company is giving titles like “Principal Staff Software Architect” to someone who is clearly junior enough that they would require a lot of mentoring and guidance if they were hired. It’s common that candidates are resistant to downleveling their titles when changing jobs, so handing out enormously inflated titles is one way companies try to trap junior employees in their companies. At least until they realize that nobody cares about their inflated titles and they still have to pass the same tech interviews as everyone else.
I was a manager-of-managers, but officially I was a “senior software engineer”. Burned me badly on a couple reference checks, until I specifically started explaining the situation during interviews.
I almost did it at my last startup, to signal the egalitarian, cooperative engineering culture that I intended. One of the concerns was that it could hurt people's career mobility out (and willingness to join, since the startup was unlikely to be the engineer's home for the next few decades until retirement).
I think it works easily when your organization is known as one of the places to go, everyone knows that they do titles that way, and that anyone there is worth considering as a hire. (But not when recruiters filter their resume keyword searches for senior, staff, or principal.)
I don't know why Google didn't do it, way back when, since they did a few other culture things. I suppose that might've set a different tone for our industry today. (Though what seemed at the time to be low-loyalty culture coming out of California was already in force when Google started, most conspicuously in what I called "IPO-hopping", and maybe Google just had to work within that, at the time.)
Legal at a bank only a vice president or higher can make some loan decisions. Thus if you go to a large chain bank to get a mortgage you will talk to a vice president. Their title must be vice president, but they doesn't make a lot of money, and don't have much power other than the ability to give you a mortgage.
Last time I posted the above someone chimed in "yeah, even though all I do is write code all day I'm a vice president because what my code does can only be done by a vice president"
You also see a lot of salesmen who are vice presidents - again they don't have a lot of power in the company, but the places they sell to want to talk to a vice president so sales hands out those titles.
Some companies believe this, but I don't think it's true. Handing out titles like candy can kill morale.
We have other titles above principal, which I wont name here because you could figure out where I work, but suffice, those titles are gated and only promotable by multiple director consensus. It keeps their numbers very, very low. My department wont mint a new one, but only hire outsiders already at the title.
Yikes, that sucks.
Then other people of the same rank become vice presidents.
At one bank anyone at director level (manager of managers) was a VP, for example.
2 years ago I was hired as Staff with pretty high bar to clear.
This year I know a team where all the seniors complain they’re not Staff, and now half the team are Staff engs.
It’s hard to imagine a team where everyone is “leading”. Some people have to be doing.
TBH I doubt the actual work people are doing has changed. It’s more about status and salary.
* Engineer First Class
* Special Engineer
* First Engineer
* Staff Engineer
* Staff Engineer First Class
* Principal Engineer
* Staff Engineer Major
* Principal Engineer First Class
* Staff Engineer of the Office
etc. Need matching insignia on the collar, of course.
Right? Because if not, I need to have a discussion about titles!
Managers deal with unrealistic salary bands via title inflation when they can, but sometimes their hands are tied. I joined a team that did have the freedom to use title inflation and ended up with a principal title in a team with more principal engineers than non-principal engineers.