Before the 90s, there was a broad consensus on roughly what constitutes a manager or a director in a big company. While it isn’t very precise with clear guidelines and rules, the interpretation was much narrower in range than it is now.

Nowadays we have a lot of companies offering “managers” at $3k and even lower. If you discount that number 20 years back by wage inflation would be ~$1.3k in 1992 dollars. Try telling anyone that you are a manager in 1992 drawing $1.3k and you would be the joker of the year.

This title inflation all started in the early 90s when then US finance companies started to dish out AVP/VP/SVP at random. The rest of the non-finance companies in US and soon the world started following suit with managers, directors, vice presidents flying everywhere. Gradually even conservative Asian conglomerates (like Japan & Korean) were forced to inflate them in order to compete for younger talent by offering them these “career progressions”.