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.

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?

Those places are rare and far between and generally have cutthroat competition for getting in.

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!