It's not about authority, it's about old-school payscales, created in an era || at traditional / vertical / hierarchical banking corporations when/where it was inconceivable that an IC could merit significantly higher compensation than a manager (let alone a manager of managers). Hence the "bank title" aspect assigned to senior or principal engineers with market rates higher than generic middle managers. An AVP (Associate Vice President) might be a not particularly senior developer.
A lot of the "VP's" would try to throw their title "UH I"M A VP so get it done" around as some sort of weight when they wanted/needed something. Originally we were always like "OH Crap" a VP needs it so it must be important. After a while we noticed the quantity and did the whole research to that conclusion. It greatly reduced our stress/workload.
Yeah I"m aware of the pay-to-title issues though that was secondary.
