In most BIG banks, "Vice President" is almost an entry-level title. Easily have 1000s of them. For example, this article points out that Goldman Sachs had ~12K VPs out of more than 30K employees: https://web.archive.org/web/20150311012855/https://www.wsj.c...
Just like all Sales folks have heavily inflated titles, no customer wants to think they're dealing with a junior salesperson/loan officer when you're about to hand over your money.
It seems like every vendor sales team I work with is an "executive" or "director of sales" even though in reality they're just regular old salespeople.
VP at Goldman is equivalent to Senior SWE according to levels.fyi and their entry level is Analyst. I'm surprised by the compensation though. I would have thought people working at a place with gold in the name would be making more. Also apparently Morgan Stanley pays their VPs $67k/year.
Tech outstripped big finance corps tech a while ago.
Traders make loads, not the SWEs