Ultimately in our culture we need to have ways to calculate what people are compensated, and I do not fault anyone for participating in the process of this type of ranking. Some number needs to be written on the offer letter and if you don't have a process for determining that as fairly as you can, then it will be entirely based on implicit biases. So people will have titles and titles will have pay bands. But that's the real, final difference between "junior" and "senior": about $100,000.
@glyph Something of a small coda to this. I think you touch on it when mentioning the mistake of assuming on whether someone is fungible based on their level but take a single organization and swap two senior engineers into different parts of the business.
From afar and for a period of time their work is going to look a little similar to what junior engineers usually do because the fastest way to get the business understanding is to go through and do the simple but tedious maintenance tasks.
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