As a junior developer at an investment bank, I had the title of Associate VP.

We needed a VP to approve every code change. Fortunately, I had three of them on my team of five.

I've personally known a couple of people that worked in NYC for big financial companies, and this was a known dodge. They even had a separate washroom and cafeteria for the real executives. I don't know the precise details, but I noticed that a software engineer colleague at a company had something on his resume about "vice president" on his resume at 'big finance co' and asked for the details.

In investment banking, the career path is generally:

Analyst (college graduate - 3 years) Associate (3 - ~6 years) Vice President (~6 - 8+) Executive Director Managing Director

There are exceptions at every level, but generally speaking, you automatically get promoted to vice president after 6 years if you stick around.

Note that the managing director has many levels. When I worked as an analyst at an investment bank, I reported to a managing director who had 3 other managing directors between him and the CEO of the investment bank (who himself reported to the CEO of the bank as a whole).

A VP at an investment bank may have a few low level analysts reporting to them, but generally it's no where near what you would call an "executive" position, although pay can still be quite high.

Ok, I get it. Investment banks pretty much make almost everybody on salary (with some obvious exceptions, e.g. interns, administrative assistants, etc.) a “vice president.” It means nothing and is more out of tradition than anything. Those “VPs” are likely FLSA exempt regardless of title, based solely on what they do and the amount of professional judgment they get to exercise.

That’s just the way banks work. VPs are managers everywhere else.

My dad knew a good old boy type guy who had an epic VP of X title. His job duties consisted of buying a dozen different newspapers at the airport and matching obituaries and reports of deaths with safe deposit box holders before 9:30AM.

Sounds like a great subscription business right there. Charge $X per month to aggregate obituaries and make them searchable or matchable to a list every day. You just replaced a $60k/year employee.

I'm sure a lot of it is good old-fashioned title inflation, but at least in the financial world part of the reason for so many VPs is that its an easy title to give someone to make them a corporate officer, and thus eligible to sign on behalf of the company.

I used to work for a large US corp that called us all professional developers, just so they don’t have to pay overtime... professional grades don’t get overtime

Well it is a "professional" job - though I suspect the employer didn't follow through on the other side i.e. self directed time no fixed hours etc.