A hiring manager sparked outrage when they revealed that they automatically reject candidates with Staff or Principal titles who only have 3-4 years of experience. It became a hot topic of discussion on the internet.
Half the replies called them a gatekeeper. The other half called it common sense.
They're both missing the point.
The candidate didn't inflate anything
A junior engineer doesn't just wake up one day and decide to call themselves a Staff Engineer. It's a title someone else has to give to them.
It's often handed out by startup founders in lieu of a competitive salary.
Datapeople analyzed millions of tech job postings from 2022. A quarter of roles that were "junior" in 2019, needing under 4 years of experience, got rebranded with "senior" titles by 2022.
Ravio's numbers are even stronger. From 2019 to 2023, there were three times as many "Lead" early in career positions, and half as many "Junior".
The role stayed the same despite the title change.
Titles became a currency
Here's the mechanism, said plainly.
More than 400 organizations were surveyed by Pearl Meyer. 54% were actively using titles to attract talent, a 35% jump from 2018.
Their managing director Susan Sandlund was frank in saying that "without big pay raises they have to give something to their key employees."
That's the whole scam in one sentence.
And employees are well aware of it. A MyPerfectResume survey revealed that 92% feel that businesses resort to exaggerated titles in order to pretend like "there is room for career advancement," all the while withholding potential pay increases.
The most surprising statistic is that 15% of people actually confessed to accepting a reduced salary in return for a fancier title.
We exchanged currency for a term.
The word stopped meaning anything
That's the reason an auto-reject seems unfair yet justifiable at the same time.
A title once used to indicate the size of the scope you worked on. Now it signifies the size of the company you worked for.
KORE1's market report hit the nail on the head when it said: "a staff engineer at a forty-person startup and a staff engineer at Google are not the same job, the same scope, or the same price." A staff title at a company that gives them away "tells you almost nothing about the person's actual scope."
Therefore, the manager isn't rejecting the individual. They're rejecting a flawed message.
However, dismissing the signal by discarding the candidate? That is not a diligent approach. The candidate is the one who suffers from the inflation, not the one causing it.
What Staff was supposed to mean
Will Larson is the one who wrote a book about this and his definition is quite strict and straightforward.
A Staff engineer is not a superior Senior engineer; it is a Senior engineer who has segued into one of the Staff roles.
Scope. Influence. Not tenure, not a raise dodge.
According to that standard, many "Staff" engineers working for a 40-person startup aren't really at the Staff level. Similarly, some engineers with only 3 years of experience are performing work at the Staff level because small teams require it.
Having many years of experience is also not a valid measure. According to data from early 2026 provided by Levels.fyi, Staff and Principal level engineers with 5-7 years of experience were making between $700K-$900K. In contrast, some Seniors with 15 years of experience were making less than that.
The market has changed and today seems to value experience above the "youthful energy" that many managers claim to seek.
The part nobody wants to say
Startups deliberately chose this approach, as it is more cost-effective to provide a printed title than to offer a salary at the experienced professional level.
Index Ventures discovered that 30% of execs who were brought on board during the "first 10" phase of a startup were early power-mongers who had inflated their job titles and only had five years or less of work experience.
But it only continues to work if the individual decides to switch jobs and that fancy title then turns into a downside.
We gave people a paper crown and then feigned shock when their next employer refused to take it as payment.
The takeaway
Please do not interpret titles as scope. Instead, consider them to be context.
One should inquire about what the individual in question actually owned. Ask about what they inspired. Ask about what fell apart in their absence. That's a 10 minute conversation, not an auto-reject filter.
→ Title tells you the company's comp philosophy, not the candidate's skill
→ YoE tells you almost nothing on its own
→ Scope is the only thing worth screening for, and it takes real questions
It's not the candidates who are at fault here. It's us - the entire industry - for transforming an actual job into a retention incentive.
So my question to you is, if you were hiring tomorrow, would you screen out a 4-year Staff engineer on sight, or would you make them prove the scope? And do you know which one your ATS actually does?
Top comments (1)
I feel that. In my job searching, everywhere I look, you see Senior, Staff and a few that just say Software Engineer and the shocking part is the experience requirements... Staff and Senior, quite lax overall with degree requirements, 4-7 years experience required on average and 1 actual requirement 'have been in a similar role', whereas the blanket 'software engineer' postings were asking for 7-10 years experience and a degree, preferably masters degree and the pay isnt even that great on those, whereas the more 'entry level' senior software engineer postings were more in-line with what you'd expect salary wise for the position and experience requirement.
The real problem is, the people doing the hiring, dont know what the work is, let alone what to look for. Case in point, Namibian banks are currently struggling with the instant-payment regulation, that requires strict PSD-9/iso-20022 and they're all hitting the wall and they're all actively searching for someone to please solve the problem for them. I sent in my resume, I have 6+ years experience, I've taken apps from every stage in their lifecycle to completion and I made a framework that's a plug-and-play solution to their dilemma. Namibia is 2.7m people, probably less than 1k developers total in the entire country, yet someone who literally builds ERP systems and built a transaction system, to solve their exact problem, doesnt even get shortlisted? Yes, because of exactly 1 reason, HR doesnt know what they're hiring for. They see 'incomplete university' and immediately trash the resume, instead of actually reading through it and seeing the raw benchmark numbers that prove competence. If the Lead devs saw that they trashed someone who solves their exact headache, let alone with numbers that dwarf anything they can possibly outsource, they'd be grabbing their pitchforks for a witch hunt in the HR department for the person responsible.
That's pretty much why Startups tend to get the best talent, because the person reviewing the resumes is the person who knows exactly what puzzle pieces are missing. Whereas someone in HR just read ".Net developer" and doesnt look at the relevance of their past work in context of the company's strains.
To answer your question, I think hiring is broken to begin with. Have an online portal, require login, open to everyone from the get-go. That portal takes them to a sample they need to fix/complete/optimize/add tests for, etc. Inherently, nothing must be broken and everything should work, without them touching it. Then time them and track activity. See how many read through it manually, vs code-dump it into their LLM, vs clone to local so they can run independently. Each application gets benchmarked. Test coverage, cleanliness, thoughtful comments, documentation, safety guardrails, security best practices and time taken. Those are the metrics that actually matter, because they translate to the workplace as 'can this person understand our code, can they optimize and make our code better, do they test it thoroughly, can they do the job efficiently'. Who cares if they use Claude, or Kimi, or do it by hand, business-wise, all that matters is they can do the job effectively and efficiently and when they leave, there's thorough documentation on their work, so the next developer doesnt have to scratch their head trying to figure it out.
Imo, that's real hiring, because it's a 'day in the life of' for the team and if you can survive that, just to get an interview, means either you're desperate, or you're excited, either way you've shown you can do the job and you're willing to put in the effort for a chance. You can run scripts for all the states of the code and documentation to see whose your top 10, shortlist them and ask them why they want to work for the company. If it's an honest answer, shortlist again. Then those final 3 candidates get 3 paid tasks to do, 1 cheap, 1 medium, 1 expensive. Essentially all 3 tasks should boil down to the same thing, but what you're looking at is whether they apply the same practices at different pay-grades, if they dont, they're out. A salary does not dictate quality, time does. If a candidate does the same quality of work across all 3 and all 3 submits are well documented, tested and verified, then that's the person you want on your team, because whether you can afford to pay them a junior's salary, or a principle's salary, you know they'll do the job to the best of their ability and you know they can do the job.
It takes longer and it's alot more involved than just outsourcing, but the employees you hire this way will be employees you'd want to keep for life.