[thehappyfellow]

I think you are basically right, in many organisations you get a lot of influence based on your title and not on your skill.

[baq]

Skill is hard to verify. Title is used as an easy to verify proxy by design. It's a feature.

How the feature is implemented in different organizations... is a different topic entirely.

[thehappyfellow]

I get that, but even if titles were an amazing proxy for skill, that will only correlate with some subset of skills and say nothing about the rest (e.g. some staff engineers are amazing technically and only pretty good as team leads or vice versa). Even assuming that title correlates well with some notion of skill, there are organisations which won’t allow someone with Fancy Title to make a decision requiring skill C if they’re bad at it - and some would have no way of stopping them.

[axus]

The word "title" makes me think of noble titles. Hard to earn, but easy to hang on to.