I cannot be alone in feeling that titles (within "tech" in particular) are almost completely arbitrary? What constitutes a "senior", "lead", "principal" and "staff" X, respectively, has so much overlap that it really depends on the organisation. I myself have been called all of those things, but have honestly not been able to tell the difference: in some cases, I have had much more responsibility as a "senior backend developer" than a "staff engineer". I have recently interviewed for a number of roles with titles like CTO, engineering manager, tech lead etc and there is so much overlap that they seem to be one and the same. Have worked at companies on three continents, in organisations ranging from 6 people to 10k+, so have seen a few titles.

> that it really depends on the organisation.

This is entirely it. Titles should be consistently ordered within an organization, but they are not portable from one organization to another.

This is a lesson I’ve had to explain over and over to people at the beginning of their careers. I’ve been asked for advice about which offer to take from people thinking about leaving 10s of thousands of dollars on the table because another company will give them a Senior Engineer title and they think that’s important.

When hiring, titles are basically ignored unless the person is coming from a company like Microsoft or Google where their leveling system is publicly known.

I’ve interviewed so many “Prinicpal Staff Engineers” or even “CTO” people who would barely qualify as senior engineers at an average company. I’ve also interviewed “Senior Software Engineers” who had more experience than knowledge than anyone on our teams (and that’s saying a lot!)

Hiring managers know this, but it’s not obvious if you haven’t done a lot of hiring or worked at a lot of different companies.

> I cannot be alone in feeling that titles (within "tech" in particular) are almost completely arbitrary?

I remember that 10 years or so ago, an E5 in Google is considered a pretty prestigious position. In Amazon, L6 is such a high achievement that the entire India site had one L6 for more than 300 engineers. But somehow things started to change. Everyone expected herself to get promoted every couple of years. There was a joke in Amazon along the line of L8 is the new L7.

My guess is that two factors came to play. One is that Meta (and then the Facebook) started to promote people really fast, so other companies followed. Also managers gradually treated promotion as a tool to retain the people they need. Once that's the incentive, a long title ladder becomes a natural choice.

As others have said, levels and titles are generally for compensation and performance reviews. Each company has their own bespoke ladder but it generally maps to:

  - L1: Intern with undergrad degree
  - L2: Intern with graduate degree
  - L3: Junior
  - L4: Intermediate
  - L5: Senior
  - L6: Staff
  - L7: Senior Staff
  - L8: Principal
  - L9: Distinguished
  - L10: Fellow

L5 or Senior is usually considered a “terminal” role. That means all engineers should be able to get to this role. And people without the headroom get managed out if they can’t get to L5.

Staff+ is usually “special”. It means that people count on you to drive initiatives and you have something special other than just writing code. You are able to make product and business impact.

Distinguished and Fellow are very rare. Large FAANG companies will only have a handful of these engineers. It means you’ve made industry-wide impact like inventing map-reduce or DynamoDB or Kubernetes.

Titles for ICs matter for two reasons: comp, and perf reviews. At bigger companies the amount of RSUs for Staff versus Senior can be substantial. At a startup where equity is worth nothing and salaries are in a tight band anyways it doesn't make a difference.

For perf reviews your title dictates the rubric you get evaluated against, but in fact your manager is probably trying to fit a curve and then work backwards to the rubric. So they'll decide you're a 3/4 and then pick some boxes for your weakest areas to mark you down in. The realpolitik of it is that you can do the same work or more at a lower level but get paid less, depending on what you negotiate coming in, your experience, previous roles, etc.

Once you get into VP, Director, and C level they are comparable between orgs on their own kind of ladder. There's levels of responsibility for outcomes associated with being higher in the food chain. Not to say there also isn't a political aspect, but they are broadly comparable between bigger orgs.

Your job title encompasses the highest-order bits about who you are, professionally. The value is much more between organizations than within a single one.

If you plan to stay at one place for a long time, it's much less important. You have a chance to figure out how things 'really' work in practice. I know a guy who is a senior architect, and everyone refers to him as that at his company, but his actual on-paper title is something like "project technical lead". It's just not very important if you are going to stay there for 20 or 30 years and chase deep breathing metis.

I don't have the same career outlook, so my job title is important to me. I actively negotiate for it. My own title is "senior DevSecOps engineer". Criticism of the acronym notwithstanding, this paints an instantly legible set of competencies around what I do best, what I do adequately, and what you probably would get better value for money paying someone else for. I'm probably pretty good at vulnerability management and securing CI/CD pipelines. Optimizing weights on our anti-spam logistic classifier is probably not the kind of thing I can do well. Etc., etc.

Titles make no sense whatsoever, you're correct, but in nearly all organizations there's a split between IC track and manager track, so the argument the OP is making is debatable but it's not absurd on its face.

I always think of the Gervais principle when it comes to titles - that they really just exist to provide illusory advancement and to get some of the minions to lord it over some of the other minions while the folks at the top of the organization benefit.

Engineering titles at least have a few things that are nearly universally shared (such as actually needing to code, expecting to mentor).

Product manager titles can have completely disjoint scopes of work between organizations - in one org they might be what was once systems designer role - getting requirements and writing specs, in another they might basically be doing UI or UX (even creating pages in figma), in others they are basically project managers.

Same for "programmer", "software developer", "software engineer", and so on. People insist that there's a real difference even when I have been all those things and there was no difference.

Rant:

I was a systems engineer for a while there.

But not a pure S/W one. Like an actual engineer with nuts and bolts and pneumatics and amps and bolts and the like. That was the title at many many companies, it was a pretty rigid one too, despite the job function being quite jack of all trades.

But then tech decided that they wanted to use Systems Engineer too. The reasons weren't bad, I guess.

But then trying to find a job in my version of the role was near impossible on any job site.

Unix this, Windows that. Sure, I used Unix systems for my job too, little servers for controlling some mechanical systems. Not like huge racks that served up billions of requests.

And then I'd get the job spam too, as I matched some keyword threshold for the S/W type systems engineer. Always a entry level role through.

Gah! Why couldn't S/W take the title of Unix Server Engineer, or Python Integration Engineer or something just a tad more specific and not bleeding all over my discipline?

Okay, whew, rant over

Within a given company, I think these roles are well-defined. In a big tech company, a principal engineer will influence decisions at a much higher level then a senior whose isn't visible outside his team. And an engineering manager support, evaluate, represent the team, and help with goal alignements.

Titles are really a trap cannot reveal the real work, everything it's related to the size of company, type of organization and sector.

A "top" position in a small company could be a mid one in a big tech but with a narrow field compared to the small one when sometimes you need to refill the coffee machine. At same time the flexibility of small one helps to solve problems of big ones.

There's a wide variance, but there's been a lot of 'title inflation' over the past decade that has more to do, I think, with giving people incentives when they don't want to stretch the equity package any further.

At my organization you can't get a raise beyond inflation percentages unless you go up a title.

It wouldn't surprise me if it's a way of gatekeeping salaries since years of employment typically outnumber the levels of title that are achievable in one's career.

This is exactly why we built https://www.levels.fyi

Too often people were getting down-leveled because they didn't know any better. The level comparisons we show on the homepage compare scope and responsibilities. People frequently think levels are based on compensation but compensation is the byproduct of it.

I am also not surprised that many P.E. have become Political Engineer as opposed to Principal Engineer.

Titles are meaningless. Many tech ICs at top companies have more influence and responsibility as well as pay than managers at low tier companies.

>are almost completely arbitrary? What constitutes a "senior", "lead", "principal" and "staff" X, respectively, has so much overlap that it really depends on the organisation

Titles at least useful to understand the hierarchy, but roles truly mean nothing. Sometimes the adult in the room is a PO, sometimes it's EM, sometimes they are responsible for the timelines and "project stuff", sometimes it's a Senior Engineer. In some places a QA is effectively doing PO stuff.

It's an artifact of humans being obsessed with hierarchy and pecking order.

Overall rather petty and boring.

One thing that's worth remembering is that companies - especially in Silicon Valley - use titles as a way to compare salary levels with each other.

If you are an engineering manager looking to make the case for raises for your team members one of the tools you have available is usually an anonymized survey of similar compensation levels from other companies.

You can say things like "this person is a high performer and is being paid 85% of the expected level for this title at other companies nearby - we should bump them up".

Your company may use job titles in a non-standard way, but there's probably an HR document somewhere that attempts to map them to more standard levels in order to make these kinds of comparisons useful.

I don't know how this works in other industries or countries, but I've seen this pattern play out in San Francisco Bay Area tech companies.

Outside of the FAANG style companies where how their levels map to each other are well known, titles are only useful to compare within the same company. You can't compare a specific title between two companies as they may not even have the same hierarchy much less requirements & expectations.

Yeah. "You already know what a title is, Neo. A title is a text field attached to a pay grade."

My employer has no formal titles for engineers pretty much for this reason.

Main distinction I tend to see is just whether you're doing line management or not, which tends to be the EM track

Beyond that, agree it seems like it can just be anything in virtually any title

It’s how good you are at politics, that’s it. Big modifier if you’re tall and attractive.

Titles are arbitrary (as in people with different titles can do similar work), but compensation is tied to a title.

> I cannot be alone in feeling that titles (within "tech" in particular) are almost completely arbitrary? What constitutes a "senior", "lead", "principal" and "staff" X, respectively, has so much overlap that it really depends on the organisation.

All the responses here won't admit that it is entirely made up, and designed to be built around a structured hierarchy which rule followers and obedient servents to the system to get closer to the $$$ printer.

It takes a lot of back-stabbing, office politics, credit stealing and dishonesty to get to "the top", which is what the replies won't tell you.

> I have recently interviewed for a number of roles with titles like CTO, engineering manager, tech lead etc and there is so much overlap that they seem to be one and the same. Have worked at companies on three continents, in organisations ranging from 6 people to 10k+, so have seen a few titles.

Here is a case study, would you interview at Meta today and work under someone far younger than you and has a more 'senior" role than you? You do understand that the "title" was made up and "created" for a particular position?

Heck, you could even build your own startup and give yourself that title if you wanted to. But the majority here will not and will work for companies like Meta under EMs that have no idea what they are doing.

Therefore it is all made up. With some "staff", "leads" and "principals" are making it up as they go along and coasting as the low rankers hold the fort as the ship sinks.

> titles (within "tech" in particular) are almost completely arbitrary

It wasn't like that some years ago.

Senior back in the days is probably your lead / staff of today.

The problem isn't just the companies but people and their expectations. You have people crying about not being made "senior" for having 2 years of experience and the world is blown apart now.

So is every company evil or broke or the social media culture these days expecting instant feedback etc?

You used to work 10+ years as an engineer and just that and it was fine.

Personally, I don't give two shits about my title. If I could just be "computer programmer", I'd be happy. But the org likes titles and as long as I have to play that stupid game, I try to get titles.

Wait until you meet a VP in finance.