Comment by hintymad

> 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.