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This is a common complaint among bosses, and its counterpart (“I totally don’t care about titles but...”) is an equally common disclaimer among job seekers. Won’t put words in Brett’s mouth, but many people assume the right thing is to do away with titles. It isn’t. 
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Titles are applied very inconsistently, often used as candy for new hires, and are frequently under-defined. These are true statements. But the cure for that, like most shitty management, is to hold managers accountable for doing their jobs, not throwing out useful tools.
The number one contributor to effective, happy teams is psychological safety — the clear knowledge of what’s expected of me and what risks I can take and what happens if I fail.
Titles are a major signifier of expectations - what you’re accountable for, what we expect from you, and what you should expect from your colleagues and boss. Promotions (new titles!) are exciting because of cash/status, but also (we hope) because they signify new responsibility
Bosses (legitimately!) don’t like title games and infighting, but when they do away with them as a result, they create huge voids of clarity around expectations - both internally and relative to the market.
Hiding expectations sucks for employees. Makes them index much more of secondary cues like “amount of face time I get with my manager” or “amount of eye contact” or “how cool my assignments are.” Because people still want to know how they’re doing but you took away the benchmark.
I think it should be obvious that this hurts marginalized employees most of all. They were already in the shitty end of most crappy management pattern-matching anyhow— clear expectations are a thing they could fall back on that you just took away.
This is double-plus bad for candidates, especially junior ones, especially marginalized ones, who feel MASSIVE pressure to “not care about titles.” Some of them, I’m sure, genuinely don’t. But those that do feel pressure not to say so because it’s seen as self-important.
Wanting clear expectations and career path is not unreasonable. It’s gaslighty to make people feel bad for that. (I should say here again, not saying Brett from the top of the thread is doing any of these things! But some bosses def do!)
Also every junior knows that the first time you get “lead” or “manager” or “director” in your title, the game changes. The headhunting changes. The opportunity changes. Don’t tell them that shit isn’t important when they KNOW it is.
If titles suck in your company, the solution is to fix them. If people are clamouring for title as a proxy for growth, the solution is to give better feedback, be a better career partner, basically to manage more effectively. To do our job as managers.
Removing clarity won’t help.
