If you can write a title for them, this is usually where a Fellow or Distinguished Engineer lands.
Most Distinguished Engineers I know are actually VP/Director levels of leadership talent, but walk up the whole ladder from building things to deciding strategy every couple of weeks.
I didn't understand the value of a title either, until I was given a big title + a large cash award in an all hands, with the goal of putting me to work in a very specific way.
The title gave me clout when dealing with middle management and then I was dropped wherever there was an ongoing crisis, told me to make decisions without worrying about my job security (including giving me accelerated vesting safeguards, so firing me to appease a VP would be very expensive).
The article ends with the exact same idea that /“Am I willing and able to be there at 3 a.m. to resolve urgent breakdowns in the very system I created?”/
That gets taken the wrong way sometimes - if you optimize to avoid the "need to wake up at 3 AM, being the only person with enough knowledge to fix it", most other things fall in place.
