Block, my current employer, does a pretty good job of defining career levels, and what each tier is asked to do that is more demanding than the previous. Between those levels and the popular terminology, it's pretty easy to talk about the career ladder, but it's a deeply flawed analogy.
To begin with, ladders have parallel sides and even rungs. Career tiers are not evenly spaced, and above a certain level you don't need as many of them: if a company employs 1,000 new-graduate engineers in 2020, that isn't a promise to need 1,000 staff-level engineers in 2035. For that matter, if the industry needs a million new graduates, that doesn't promise a million future senior engineering slots. At some point the track becomes a career pyramid.
But it isn't zero-sum, either. Some engineers will plateau and not reach the next higher level... but some will become engineering managers. Or product managers. Or something else; I have a colleague now in technical support (very technical support, to external developers) working with me to become a product-focused software engineer; I had an earlier engineering colleague who did the reverse. You literally can't climb your way to "the top" because there isn't only one top.
I can be pretty competitive in the right contexts, but in life, I don't see the point: find the path that makes you happiest. And for careers, it's something more multi-path than a ladder, and should be something more fun, so I use the analogy of a career jungle gym. Play on it. And if, to you, that means knowing the endgame you want and exactly how you want to get there, then you do you. I more often look for what rung I want to swing to next, and maybe the one after that. But don't think there's only one choice!
(Edit: In 2025, I heard it called a career lattice, which I liked. But the same speaker thought that "career pathing" was an acceptable phrase, so... I dunno, it worked for them, but my grammar police says a hard no for "pathing.")
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