What’s the actual point of titles?

I feel there is so much title bloat everywhere that the titles are starting to mean nothing.

With 50 plus hiring interviews in my career, and I’ve noticed a pattern that feels very specific to senior designers and the title itself.

The definition of what a senior designer actually is holds such immense breadth that it’s honestly shocking. I’ve interviewed seniors who were clearly operating as principals, and I’ve met such delusional ones that most of the interns I’ve worked with would blow them out of the water.

So with that said, what’s the actual point of titles?

Are they a reward for growth?

Are they there to establish hierarchy?

Are they supposed to help us understand what to strive for next?

Or are they mostly there to satisfy the ego?

Because theoretically, if all of us were simply called designers, but the people creating the most impact were paid the best, wouldn’t that already give us something meaningful to strive for?

On one hand, we can’t all be equal in terms of skill, judgement, responsibility or impact. There is no real equality in nature, and pretending that everyone operates at the same level would be just as delusional.

A senior designer in one company could be a principal in another. A lead somewhere else might barely be senior. And sometimes the person with the biggest title is not even the person creating the most value. So the problem seems to be that we treat the title as proof of ability vs their core meaning - a label of operational level inside one particular company.

So maybe, just maybe, the better system is not to remove titles completely, but to make them far less important...