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There is this whole subculture of fetishization of titles and honorifics in general that some people feel very strongly about. But there are a ton of other places where basically no one cares and they'll look at you sideways if you insist on them caring.

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I used to be in group A but now I'm probably in group B. If I compare title/rank between engineering and managerial tracks where I work, there are many, many more people sitting at that rank in management than there are in engineering. The rank confers all sorts of things in terms of pay, chiefly it's used for determining our performance bonuses. I suspect that engineers are just being played by our corporate overlords but I'm not inside of the management beast to know for sure.

Having a good IC advancement track is somewhat orthogonal to a focus on specific titles across companies though. I've always been an IC and I mostly haven't even used whatever my official title was--and might even have had to look it up.

If there is an IC advancement track then the titles don't matter. All the discussion around titles is specifically to have an IC advancement track, which very few companies have.

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