Unfortunately, you don't get a job title created specifically for your social snowflake expertise, even if you're the only person who knows how to do some parti

Unfortunately, you don't get a job title created specifically for your social snowflake expertise, even if you're the only person who knows how to do some particular thing. That's a major red flag for legal and HR everywhere that screams "sue us for discrimination" because some disgruntled employee didn't get the title they wanted. So, instead we get vanilla titles that apply to groups of people. Unfortunately, nobody likes to apply for or be called "junior", and "software engineer" is passe because the "senior" in senior software engineer doesn't refer to seniority at all. IC also better describes the nature of the job requirements. You're not expected to lead, design or plan timelines. The expectation is that you make contributions at the individual level (write code, maybe spec out your own work) as opposed to planning work others will do or leading a team. "Actual worth", as you say, is really quite subjective. Someone could be the lynchpin of the company by being the sole person that understands some component. They might be 10x more productive at writing code. That's actually bad for the company if they aren't able or willing to lift others up with them- they become a bus factor of one, and planning on them being around forever is just bad planning, period.