Titles can be incredibly useful. If a title defines the way employees contribute (leadership, impact, independence, ability to own complex systems, etc) you now give the team an unambiguous set of expectations, a template to guide your team's professional development, and concrete metrics to assure a fair promotion process.

It also helps you compensate people fairly. Unconscious bias, differences in individual employees's abilities to negotiate, and other factors can often mean that equal contribution is not equally rewarded. Tying compensation to title, which is in turn tied to concrete and measurable expectations, reduces this inequality.

The devil's in the details, but well implemented, it can be hugely positive.

I am by no means and expert in the subject and this is my own personal opinion:

If you have a flat organizational structure, it could be beneficial from certain perspectives among peers. Promotes equality, removes walls between people, makes senior co-workers more approachable.

However it does not resonate well with everyone. Some people need to have some kind of indication where they are within the organization - they think of it kind of like a "status symbol". Taking titles away from these people might feel like a demotion to them.

How the company I work at deals with it is this: there are no official titles for anyone and everyone can make up one for themselves, should they feel it to be important. And thus we have happiness engineers for support and professional services, lead pixel guru for front-end and many similar, often playful titles.

When talking to an outsiders or customers, we forego this and say a title that describes our position, experience and field more accurately so that the customer can have an idea who they are talking to.

I'd say, that the answer to this question should be examined within the constraints of the given organization and general principals be adopted to the needs of the organization and the people in it. I don't think it's a simple yes-no question and thus I did not vote either.

Titles are a tricky topic. Some people don't care about them at all, others care deeply. Most people are somewhere in the middle and do like a title bump once in a while to show career progression.

Plus, titles are not just for internal consumption. Titles help you quickly describe what you do to someone that doesn't work with you; and ultimately it's what you put on your CV.

So titles serve a purpose; but they are also a bit of a litmus test for a company's culture. If people are getting seriously worked up about titles, there's a fair chance they're actually upset about bigger things.

One trick I like for companies that do business cards: don't let anyone put their title on a card. Just name, company and contact details. It's not just a way to avoid reprinting cards when someone gets a new title, it's a nice equaliser.

It sucks, to be frank. I don't mind anything about title, unless someone throws it into my face. I have had few discussions., where the conversation went like this "I am Senior Software Developer. So suck it, I have more brain than you!". Just because his title had Senior, he thinks he is on top of everybody whose titles misses that.

So just strip all and make them plain old Software Engineer!!!

Although I want to agree with this, I can't. The problem is that for alot of organisations the levels only correspond to technical skillset, not things like responsibility and mentorship, which is where I think a lot of dissatisfaction comes from. I've in the past hired an engineer who was by all technical measures a better developer than I was, but he was impatient and often deployed code that caused regressions. He was also reluctant to share reasoning behind decisions, leaving him the only one that fully understands some of his solutions.