For me, when I'm looking for a new role I tend to gravitate toward the type and quality of work and the quality of the company. Salary has been an important secondary concern in my last few positions, though I've been lucky enough that I haven't needed to worry much about that much due to demand for Cloud Architects and Engineers, and my flexibility as it relates to relocation. And most of the roles I have taken in the last five years have been somewhat innovative due to the nature of the work and the technologies being used (cloud-native services, serverless event-driven architectures, ML, etc...).
I haven't really cared about my title for quite some time now. I've had one role where my title changed seven times in less than 2 years. In the last five years alone I've been an Operations Systems Administrator, Systems Engineer, DevOps Engineer, Cloud Engineer, and Cloud Architect. Across all of those titles, I've done the same type of work with varying degrees of seniority, responsibilities, and focus.
When it comes to disclosing previous salaries I've been pretty open when I am actively pursuing opportunities. I'm not going to devote hours of conversation and meetings with an organization just to find out the pay and benefits are not where they need to be. That's disrespectful of their time, and a waste of mine. I'll usually discuss that within the first couple of meetings with a recruiter or HR representative, and if appropriate I disclose it without prompting. I've not had a circumstance where it has had a negative result, and in the most recent offer I accepted (last week) I think it helped. In the right situation, I think it is an easy and low-risk means of establishing an open dialogue of trust. Now if a recruiter is contacting me about a role out of the blue, I rarely give out my current salary or even an indication of it until I've had time to research the opportunity. And I can't recollect having anyone outright ask me for my current salary.
