> Sometimes the folks who already have Staff engineer titles are protective of diluting their prestige. In other cases, organizations may be wary of having multiple Staff engineers on a single team due to team health or budgetary concerns.

That is actually sad and pathetic. Imagine having to boot-lick higher-ups for years and throwing your own colleagues under the bus by playing office politics for a made up title that has little to no "prestige".

Such behavior of this is easy to spot in an organization. At the end of the day in the AI age, the executives will look at the "operational costs" and "stock based compensation" (SBC) column and will immediately downsize the company and everyone is affected, including any engineers even if it means a 1% stock increase.

If you don't own any productive asset such as a startup or side-project generating profits you are SOL.