I'm stuck inside a 5000 person IT company hiding inside a much larger consumer product company, and 3/5 of us are all 'principal' engineers by title. This inclu

I'm stuck inside a 5000 person IT company hiding inside a much larger consumer product company, and 3/5 of us are all 'principal' engineers by title. This includes a bevy of old timers who exist just to run a few ancient shell scripts and otherwise keep a chair warm. Although they are shrinking quickly, they still vastly outnumber us coming in from the software industry. There is no title above principal here; we are hired into principal and that's it until we invariably get bored or stressed out and leave. We have other titles above principal, which I wont name here because you could figure out where I work, but suffice, those titles are gated and only promotable by multiple director consensus. It keeps their numbers very, very low. My department wont mint a new one, but only hire outsiders already at the title.