In traditional engineering—civil, mechanical, structural—a “Senior Engineer” is someone the insurance company will let sign off on blueprints. If those blueprints fail and a bridge collapses, there is liability. There are lawsuits. There are corpses. The title is not social; it is a legal and physical fact. It is directly tied to how much you can be trusted, which directly tied to what you can earn. A Senior Engineer can be trusted because the product is permanent and failure is irreversible.

Software engineering has adopted the language—Junior, Mid-level, Senior, Principal—without inheriting the constraint. Our products are abstract. They can be refactored in a weekend. Deploys can be rolled back in minutes. Because there is no bridge and no corpses, the title has drifted from accountability into something far more useful to everyone involved: a financial instrument. A title is how you negotiate your salary. It is how you signal your value to recruiters. It is how you move between companies with a raise. It is a widget in the compensation machinery. A “Senior” at one company might be a “Mid” at another, but the salary swing between them is material. That is why the title matters: not because it describes your function, but because it is literally how much money you can ask for. It is also why everyone lies about it.

This is not a complaint about salary negotiation. It is an observation about what happens when a title becomes a financial tool instead of a description of what you actually do.

I. The Function That Got Lost

There was once clarity here. A Senior had more responsibility. More responsibility meant more weight when things broke. The title was tied to the scope of failure you were authorized to cause. A Junior could break their feature. A Senior could break the database. A Principal could break the business. The salary reflected not your intelligence but your radius of destruction. The title and the money were locked together.

Somewhere in the expansion of tech employment from thousands to millions, this connection evaporated. Titles became portable—and divorced from the work. They became signals to recruiters and hiring committees. They became financial tokens. A company could hire a “Senior Engineer” at 180k and assign them to implement well-defined tickets. Nobody called them out on it because the word had become a monetary category, not a description of what you actually do. The person doing the work and the person who signed the hire approval both understood the unspoken deal: the title is the price, and the job is whatever we need done. The title justified the salary. The job was secondary.

This is when the decoupling accelerated. Once a title became a financial category—a bracket in the compensation structure, a band on the salary bands spreadsheet—it could be applied to any work. A “Senior” at Google who designs distributed systems and a “Senior” at a startup who implements CRUD endpoints both get the same title because they are both in the same salary band. The title no longer describes your function. It describes your price point.

The symptom is the joke: “How many Senior Engineers does it take to build a simple CRUD app?” Too many. Because “Senior” stopped meaning “authorized to make architectural decisions” and started meaning “costs this much” or “successfully negotiated.” The role and the payment drifted apart. Now we have a financial instrument masquerading as a description of work.

II. Three Taxonomies That Reattach Title to Function

If we rebuild the system around what people are actually paid to be responsible for instead of how much they can negotiate, we get something more honest. The point is not to remove money from the equation—it is to make the money honest.

The Scope of Impact model strips away the negotiable names entirely and replaces them with concentric circles of financial responsibility. A Task-Focused person is paid for the correctness of their feature (low risk, low salary). A System-Focused person is paid for the stability of a service (medium risk, medium salary). A Domain-Focused person is paid for the long-term viability of a product area (high risk, high salary). A Strategic-Focused person is paid for the relationship between the company’s technical investments and its survival (existential risk, compensation reflects that). You cannot fake your way into a circle because your circle is defined by what actually breaks when you are wrong—and how much of the company’s revenue breaks with it. The model is self-enforcing. A Strategic-Focused person in a company with broken infrastructure quickly becomes Strategic-Unemployed, and deservedly so.

The Ambiguity & Autonomy model flips the question. It does not ask “How much do you know?” but “How much uncertainty can you bear without drowning the company?” A Guided Practitioner is paid to solve well-defined problems—low ambiguity, lower salary. A Problem Solver is paid to find the path when the goal is clear—medium ambiguity, medium salary. A Complexity Manager is paid to define the goal itself when the landscape is shifting—high ambiguity, high salary. A Visionary is paid to anticipate problems that do not exist yet—existential ambiguity, compensation reflects the weight of being wrong. This model is honest about what seniority actually is: not knowledge accumulation but the mental and emotional capacity to be paid to be uncertain. Not everyone wants to operate at higher levels of ambiguity, and that is fine. The taxonomy does not shame them. It just pays them accordingly.

The Liability-Based model returns to the contract. Salary is not compensation for knowledge or effort. Salary is compensation for risk. A Contributor carries the risk of their own errors (low, because they are caught in review, so low salary). A Lead carries the risk of their team’s errors (medium risk, medium salary). A Principal carries the risk of production integrity (high risk, high salary). An Officer carries the risk of organizational survival (existential risk, compensation reflects that). This model ties compensation directly to the weight you carry and makes clear why it differs: not because Seniors are better humans, but because they are authorized to cause bigger failures and the company pays them to own those failures. The model is cynical but honest. It says what everyone knows but nobody states in a title: you are paid for the damage you might cause, and the salary brackets reflect the scale of that damage.

III. Why We Resist Better Taxonomies

The current system serves certain people very well. It allows a company to hire someone with an impressive title and pay them less than their title would normally command—because the title is just a label, not a binding contract of responsibility. It allows an employee to negotiate a title bump that pays the same as before—because the title has decoupled from the salary in the hiring conversation. It allows both sides to play the same game: the title is the agreed-upon lie that makes the salary feel justified.

“Senior” is vague enough that it serves both sides. An employee can claim high responsibility without delivering it. A company can claim they are hiring a senior person while assigning junior work. Everyone gets to tell themselves a story: I am being paid what I am worth because my title reflects my value. When it does not—when a Senior is doing junior work or a Junior is doing senior work—the title remains stable. It is the compensation that lies, not the title. And everyone accepts it because the alternative is too honest.

A taxonomy built around actual function and commensurate compensation would force brutal clarity. You could not hire a “Domain-Focused Architect” and have them implement tickets—because the salary for “Domain-Focused” only makes sense if the work is domain-focused. You could not claim “Complexity Management” while working from a detailed specification—because the premium for complexity vanishes when there is no complexity. The role, the work, and the compensation would have to align. This is harder for everyone. It is harder for hiring managers, who would have to articulate what they actually need and pay for it honestly. It is harder for employees, who would have to deliver what they claim or admit they cannot. It is harder for organizations, who would have to admit when they have hired the wrong person for the actual job—which means admitting they overpaid or underpaid or both.

But it would also be clearer. The lie would be gone. And that terrifies everyone.

IV. The Deeper Question

The reason “Senior” has become a joke is that it stopped describing a function and became a price tag that detached from the work. You negotiate a “Senior” title, and you get the salary bump. Now what? You stay in that salary band forever, doing whatever work the company assigns, because you have already extracted the financial value of the word. The taxonomy has no answer for what happens next because the title was never about the work—it was about the money.

A better system would align the two again. It would ask: What is the nature of the problem you are solving? What is the financial value of getting it right? What is your radius of influence? How much ambiguity can you handle before we lose money? How much weight are you carrying? These are questions about function and compensation, not status. They have answers that can be verified against budget and outcome. They change over time and between jobs. They are portable because they describe what you can actually do and what you should actually earn for doing it.

The uncomfortable conclusion is this: a healthy taxonomy ties seniority to financial responsibility, not to human value. If we redefined “Senior” to mean “The person we are paying to ensure the architectural integrity of a system, with their salary reflecting the risk if they fail,” then either you are that person or you are not. You cannot negotiate your way there with rhetoric. You cannot tenure your way there by waiting. You cannot politics your way there by office dynamics. You either carry that weight—and accept the salary that binds you to it—or you do not.

The question it forces on everyone is simple, brutal, and true: Are you being paid for the amount of ambiguity and risk you can absorb, or are you just collecting a paycheck while someone else does the work your title claims you own?

As they say in The Wolf of Wall Street: “The real question is: can you afford not to be?” Except here the question is sharper. Can you afford the honesty? Because once you admit that a title is just a financial token with no connection to the work, you have to either live with the lie or renegotiate the whole deal. And renegotiation terrifies everyone.

Coming next

A forthcoming essay will move beyond the critique and offer a substantive framework: the distinction between engineers, technologists, and technicians. Not as titles or pay grades, but as descriptions of what kind of problems each solves and what kind of responsibility each carries. This is the constructive answer to the question “what are we actually paying for?”

Further reading

  • Shape Up by Ryan Singer — on defining scope and ownership without titles.
  • An Elegant Puzzle by Will Larson — on the actual work of engineering leadership beyond the title.
  • The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks — on why adding people is not adding capacity; why the role matters more than the hiring.
  • Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim — on measuring what actually matters in engineering (not titles).
  • The Wolf of Wall Street (2013, dir. Martin Scorsese) — on the irony of financial systems that reward the lie over the work.