The problem is that companies with less-experienced upper management think that they can save money by handing out awesome new titles instead of more money. In the short term, they’re right, it’s an old trick that will always work… on certain people. But the people that works on are the kind of people you probably don’t want to retain. Often this happens at companies that have a small software team, but are not primarily software or even technology companies.

I’ve interviewed “Principal Software Engineers” whose understanding of software engineering and computer science were minimal, and it’s because of this phenomenon. Just last week I talked to one who couldn’t explain what what makes an interface RESTful. They had no idea how Git works beyond commit and push. They wrote a unit test that did the exact same stateless thing twice, and asserted that the results were identical. They wanted $250K/yr.