I'm not aware of companies caring what your current or last job title is when they hire you, and for that reason I don't think most developers care what title t

I'm not aware of companies caring what your current or last job title is when they hire you, and for that reason I don't think most developers care what title they get when taking a new job. The titles are really only important internally, if companies have a culture of respecting certain titles, or when they have strict salary bands for each job title that are matched to some supposed industry standard. Salary bands are a blanket corporate policy that many companies use to enforce a very crude form of hiring discipline, and over time they can get really out of touch with reality (always on the low side, of course.) In the last couple of years I've spoken with several companies that limit the salary of "senior" developers to $160k or even less. Some of these are stodgy old companies like you would expect, but some are also midwestern companies that are switching to a "remote first" model but still have salary bands calibrated to their low-COL city of origin. Managers deal with unrealistic salary bands via title inflation when they can, but sometimes their hands are tied. I joined a team that did have the freedom to use title inflation and ended up with a principal title in a team with more principal engineers than non-principal engineers.