My experience of speaking to people who make the decisions is that titles are absolutely a social signal that gets people to listen. Now, if what you say is too whacky, or you demonstrate a total lack of ability once given a chance, then you’ll lose that listening privilege. However, a more senior title can get people’s ears opened in the first place.
One could argue that if you work in a place where people only start listening to you if you have the right title, that place might not have the best culture to begin with.
Instead of trying to climb those ranks, it might perhaps make more sense to look for a place where your input is valued based on its own merit and not based on what label is attached to your active directory entry.
Lots of places don’t have the best culture, you work with what you’ve got in life.
You might be applying for a job and, since they have limited other information, your existing job title is used as signal to figure out if what you’re saying has merit. Particularly if what you’re saying doesn’t mesh with their own experience or expectations.
> One could argue that if you work in a place where people only start listening to you if you have the right title, that place might not have the best culture to begin with.
There isn't a single place where status (and by extension titles showing that status) wouldn't change how people communicate and how open they are to your ideas.
If you think you're in a place that doesn't do that, you're either deliberately closing your eyes to it, are the privileged high status person (and closing your eyes to it) or you don't understand how human relations work.
Even in places where "your own merit" counts, there's a big status gradient between which ideas get listened to. If you don't have titles encoding that status gradient, you just have informal authority structure which does the same.
Of course it's unrealistic to expect that the status gradient simply shouldn't matter. It's perfectly natural (and useful, healthy) to weigh what people say according to their status, to some degree. It's just human relations, as you say.
Where things become problematic is when their putative status becomes the primary or overriding factor. That is, "X is true (simply) because Y said so" environments. Or "You're just an L{N}, but I'm a L{N+k} so even though I don't actually know what I'm talking about, I don't have to listen to you" environments.
What is the value of credibility under this way of thinking? If someone has a history of delivering but you think their idea is bad, do you give them a chance? Or vice versa, if someone has great vision and a history of failing, do you give them a chance?
Is there no weight to credibility? Similarly, if Terry Tao refuses to even read your ideas unless you have the right professional look, is that cruelly dismissive and arrogant?
FWIW, those places are (hopefully) not at your company... it is like, you are at a conference or trying to get meetings with people from other companies.
I worked at a place with great culture, where everyone on a team would have a say on decisions or could start and drive new initiatives that would get an ear from the team, TO A FAULT, and still people would turn around and ask for the promotion. At times this would be for money, but at times where it wasn't, I guess it was for the status. Maybe, now I think about it, it may not be for the status within the organization in question, but rather for the status with friends or, you know, on LinkedIn!
In one of my work experiences, "titles" were used as opposed to (or with a meager) paycheck raises. The most ridiculous aspect was that we had a fair number of group leaders, each with a team of 1 (just themselves).
