[gumby]

> A bit of a cynical take (on Hacker News no less) but after being in the industry for a while, my view is that the best definition of “level” is self-referential: it corresponds to the ability of a person to convince others that they are at that level.

This is of course not just in "the industry" -- for an extreme example there are a lot of elections arund the world in 2024 and almost all of them have at least one candidate trying to convince the hiring team (i.e. the voters) that they are qualified to do a job they've never done before.