Especially in times when managers want to retain their best, they often can’t get HR to budge on salaries. So they promote them to get them into a competitive salary range.
It depends on the company. In my company (100,000 employees, but in IT less than 3,000) "senior" can be a college student, even "senior manager" can be a 22 year old college student, while "director" is the lowest level manager (with people reporting). They changed the titles recently saying "we have to align to the market", but it was to compensate the low salaries with high, meaningless titles.
For example a colleague was hired as an electrical engineer in a manufacturing plant in Germany. Because she did not speak German well enough (she is an immigrant), they gave her the position of plant IT manager with "senior manager" title. She is not even an IT person, just graduated college in EE, she does not know to write a line a code if her life depends on it. But hey, she is a senior! that is the point of the article.
Senior is the new “mid level” dev
Dev is the new “junior” dev
Especially in times when managers want to retain their best, they often can’t get HR to budge on salaries. So they promote them to get them into a competitive salary range.