[Impossible]

I believe this is what OP means by "covert" levels. There are no official levels but you were equivalent to senior principal even though you had no official level. Either all ICs are doing senior principal level work, which probably can't be true because no org has that many jobs with that scope of work and generally you're talking about cross org, architecture level work, multiple "lower level" engineers need to support and implement that work at that level. All flat organizations have implicit hierarchies, especially once they grow to a certain size

[jedberg]

Their claim was that the 20% raises were explained by the person jumping a “secret” level, and my counterclaim was that that wasn’t the cause, because one year everyone in my group got a 20% raise and also because I didn’t have any levels, secret or otherwise, left to go.

[H8crilA]

Thanks for the details. Yes, I implied it's just some murky water bullshit, but it does look interesting.