IMO tech suffers pretty horrible title inflation. If you reach "senior" after only two years and "principle" after 5, what is left for the next 20 years? It's pretty ridiculous. But this sort of thing is really typical. The average tenure of someone in tech is probably about 2 years and each year the expectation is to see "big" career progression. Very often "When is my title going to change" is asked literally in the first year performance review.

I'm sympathetic to the title inflation issue but more on the problem of the "engineer" title, not to mention the "scientist" title.

For example, I work in Data & AI and we have:

- data engineer

- analytics engineer

- data scientist

- AI engineer

What I don't know is what's the alternative?

Data Engineers are basically software developers.

Analytics Engineers were Data Analysts or BI Analysts but the job has changed so much that neither of those titles fit.

My opinion is that basically everyone should just be a "Developer" or "Programmer" and then have the area suffixed:

- Data Engineer → Developer (Data Infrastructure)

- Analytics Engineer → Developer (Analytics)

etc.