Reading through this comment section I get the feeling a lot of folks here are rather confused about what it is they really want. On one hand they care about pr

Reading through this comment section I get the feeling a lot of folks here are rather confused about what it is they really want. On one hand they care about producing quality work, and value doing meaningful work like helping others or solving problems nobody else wants to touch, and on the other hand they expect to receive this senior title in recognition of their efforts and get disillusioned when they fail to do so. There's so much resentment in this thread about colleagues who have titles, when they aren't producing superior work. You're clearly judging your peers (and by extension yourself) based on quality of work, so why care about the title? If you can write good code, or design great APIs, or build excellent tests or clean up outdated codebases, I don't care if your title is Emperor of the Universe or Junior Intern, you're welcome on my team any time and I'll be glad to have you on board and build awesome products with me. If you want to get that title, then by all means go play the title game like the author. Focus on metrics, forget about producing meaningful work, and you'll be on the fast lane to become one of those people that you resent right now. Anyone remember those "unprofessional" titles like "Chief Executive Ninja" and whatnot that were so popular in the startup scene a while ago? These people were simply signaling that they didn't really care about titles and cared about other things instead, like building product, or adding value in some form. I used to work at a startup where everyone could pick their own title; so anyone could be a senior engineer if they wanted to. Ofcourse it didn't matter if they did, because nobody was judged by their title, but by their work. If that's what you want, then go and find a place like that; they exist! Kudos to the author for figuring out what he wants.