Hiring for Adjectives
There is no agreed definition of "senior". One company hands it out after a year, another after ten, and yet the industry treats it like some infallible unit of measurement.
Engineering, at its core, is the application of various domains in the pursuit of solving problems. So recruitment really has one question to answer: can this person solve problems? That's a hard thing to judge in half an hour, and our answer for the past decade or more has been to prepend an ever-increasing vocabulary of adjectives to people's job titles and hope the adjectives do the judging for us.
Then comes the inflation. If everybody else is Senior, how do you distinguish yourself? Well, that's where we start to introduce Staff and Principal, which of course expands to even more absurdity to include Senior Principal or Senior Staff and so on. Each new tier gets minted to restore a distinction the last one lost, and like any currency printed in ever greater quantities, each one buys a little less than the last.
I should be fair to titles, because none of this is purely vanity of course. They sometimes map to pay bands and they give people some sense of whether they're progressing or standing still. As well we also have to deal with ATSs that won't surface a CV without the right keyword in it. If the filter reads adjectives, candidates will supply adjectives. "Hate the game, not the player" as they say.
The closer two of these titles sit to each other, the less the gap between them tells you. Put a Senior and a Principal in front of me from two different companies and I couldn't say which one handles more ambiguity, owns more of a system, or is better to have in the room on a hard problem. All I'd know is that two sets of people, applying two standards I've never seen, landed on two different words. The distinction may be real inside the company, but outside of that it evaporates.
The odd result is that the titles we chase end up mattering more in recruitment than the problems we solve. Which is totally at odds with what engineering is about.
So if you're hiring, ask what problem someone owned end to end, what was ambiguous about it, what they decided and what it cost them. Ask what they'd do differently, because the people who really owned it have a list ready and the people who were merely nearby don't.
None of that is as quick as a keyword search, and I know that's the whole appeal of the keyword search, but titles are only a cheap filter until you count what they filter out, and missing someone because they didn't use the right adjective in their title is an expensive way to save time.