The title often relates to the money, which is the bit you probably want.

I don't typically care about title, but it does matter a bit when you are talking to others outside your company (or even inside of its big enough)

I recall giving talks where I was principal on important projects, but my title didn't reflect that so during chats after the presentation I had people ask who I was and I didn't really feel satisfied with the answer I was giving. I could tell I was being undersold just by my title. Is that their mistake? Kinda, but they're acting on the info they had available and to their read, I was not principal so someone else must have been the one who architected the project.

Of course those clued in, other devs or experienced management could tell by the talk that I lead the technical side. As much as I love just building stuff, getting my career dues would be nice.

I had to learn the hard way that HR people and MBA people do not care about anything to do with the quality of your work. They're playing power and status games and they expect you to be playing power and status games, otherwise you just seem weak and low status. As a logically-thinking programmer, I hate it, obviously.

I think there are pragmatic reasons to care that extend beyond vanity. If I want Staff-level pay, responsibilities, and organizational influence I need to make it to Senior first.

Perhaps it's a bad signal if an engineer cares _only_ about their title though.

When you work for a company like Google, that title change determines whether or not you are taken seriously. People that get stuck at the same level are often pushed out of teams with performance improvement plans. They expect you to strive for promotion and the culture in these places is reinforcing this progression. It's mostly theater but the outcomes for people's pay is very real, thus the focus on title.

Junior programmers are the idiot foil of all anecdotes on HN in the last three years. Only juniors do that; everything went fine until the junior...; anyway, the junior sent me a eight thousand diff of obvious slop; so now I got my first gray hairs, thanks Jane Junior; juniors writing naive, clearly quadratic code.[1]

Naturally these are the least skilled of your colleagues so that part is a given. But almost all anecdotes are about them as foils. Very few about them as the next generation being mentored.

It’s so slanted that people have to actively temper the euphoria shared by tech billionaires and 100X engineers with 25+ years of non-slop code experience: well until the seniors get an immortality pill you still need to raise new 100X engineers.

Of course the response to this will be, “I never cared about titles! The “juniors I talk about have work experience ranging from zero to thirty years!”...

[1] Sources: all made up.