> I can't tell you how many 'vice presidents' are in my rolodex

Yes I have seen this. This person was boasting about being a "Vice President" and then I see almost everyone is a VP. What is up with this?

Suppose you are the CEO of a bottle cap company in the Midwest. Whose call you going to take, a VP at Goldman or a junior banker at Goldman?

Vice President at financial companies is just a mid-senior title. Similar to L4/L5 at Google. There is no expectation of managing people.

My resume and LinkedIn original had "vice president" as my title (as a bank SWE). It seemed to be detrimental to finding a job at a tech company, so I've long since replaced it with just "senior software engineer" to much better results.

One FAANG hiring manager outright told me he found it very intimidating.

Sure. The first time around at megacorp I left shortly before a reorg that demoted my manager to IC status. He was still a manager when I returned but a manager with no direct reports.