A few of the examples I saw were for people working in consultancies. It's in the consultancy's interests to charge you out as a "senior", so they tend to push

A few of the examples I saw were for people working in consultancies. It's in the consultancy's interests to charge you out as a "senior", so they tend to push you up quite quickly. But then when people leave the consultancy they don't want to drop from "senior" to regular, and they new employer says "what do I care, it's just a title", so you now you have someone with 2 years total experience, coming into a telco as a "senior engineer". Now the people that have been there for 4 years complain that they're more senior than this new guys, so they get bumped to "senior" as well, but now the genuinely senior engineers want a new title, so they get to be a "solution designer" or something like that...