In all fairness, titles like "senior", "lead", "staff" tend to be allotted to developers solely on years of experience, and not on any consistent (across compan

In all fairness, titles like "senior", "lead", "staff" tend to be allotted to developers solely on years of experience, and not on any consistent (across companies) metric of performance. I've done my fair bit of hiring for quant trading roles at my firm, and some junior traders can easily stand head to head against many of the wizened senior traders we've interviewed and hired, who've had years of experience at leading companies. Perhaps in that respect, financial firms are more meritocratic than tech companies. And also with jobs largely immune to AI, because nobody's stupid enough to send their code to OpenAI or GitHub.