I Don't Need Your Title. Neither Do You.

A guy I worked with got promoted to "Tech Lead" after two years. First thing he did? Update LinkedIn. Second thing? Order new business cards. Third thing? Start telling people what to do.

He never shipped a system that handled real traffic. Never debugged a production outage at 2am. Never made an architecture decision he had to live with for years.

But he had the title. So he must be a leader, right?

The Title Trap

Here's what I've noticed: the people who chase titles the hardest are often the ones least qualified to hold them.

They optimize for promotions. They play politics. They take credit for team wins. They make themselves visible to the right people at the right time.

And it works. They get the title.

But titles don't transfer knowledge. You can't shortcut the 10,000 hours. You can't fake the pattern recognition that comes from debugging the same class of problems for a decade.

The title says "Senior Engineer." The code review says otherwise.

What Actually Matters

I've met Staff Engineers who couldn't explain how a database index works. I've met Junior Developers who could architect systems that scaled to millions.

The difference? One optimized for career progression. The other optimized for learning.

The first person has a better title. The second person has actual skills.

Guess which one I'd hire.

The Knowledge Compound Effect

Skills compound. Titles don't.

Every hard problem you solve makes the next one easier. Every production outage you survive teaches you something no course ever will. Every architecture decision that blew up in your face is a lesson you'll never forget.

But switching jobs every 18 months for a better title? That resets your context. You never see the long-term consequences of your decisions. You never build the deep expertise that comes from living with a codebase for years.

You collect titles. You never collect wisdom.

The Leaders I Respect

The best leaders I've worked with never introduced themselves by title. They introduced themselves by what they were working on.

"I'm fixing the payment retry logic" hits different than "I'm the VP of Engineering."

They earned respect through competence, not org charts. They could still write code. They understood the systems they were responsible for. When things broke, they were in the trenches, not in meetings.

Real authority comes from knowledge. Fake authority comes from titles.

My Rules

1. Never optimize for titles. Optimize for learning. The titles will follow—or they won't, and you won't care.

2. Stay technical as long as possible. The moment you stop building, your skills start decaying. Management is a different job, not a promotion.

3. Judge people by their work, not their LinkedIn. The best engineers I know have boring profiles. They're too busy building to update them.

4. Be suspicious of rapid promotions. Someone who's "Senior" after two years probably skipped important lessons. Time in the field matters.

I spent years chasing titles too. Got some of them. Realized they meant nothing when I couldn't solve the problems in front of me.

Now I just focus on getting better. The title is whatever HR needs it to be.

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The title doesn't make you competent. The work does.

— blanho