On May 9, 2014, at 10:31 AM, David Parter <dpar...@cs.wisc.edu> wrote:
> Titles can be very important when they are wrong or misleading. Management --
> at a layer far removed from the day-to-day work -- will ask HR for
> information on the staff. Management will use the titles as reported by HR to
> make plans and decisions.
>
> Assume, for example, all the sysadmins have the same "wrong" title or set of
> titles ("computer operator" in this case, which is a mainframe type title).
> Management gets a report that says that the company has a bunch of "computer
> operators," but they know that they got rid of the mainframe years ago, and
> since then they have made a big effort at automation (what you are in fact
> doing). So they make plans to eliminate the operator positions, as part of
> the cost savings that they expect from the IT Operations Automation
> project....
+1000
We had this situation at Peak, where everyone had been given a title of
"Systems Engineer", when the vast majority of their work was "Customer Service
System Administration". Very few of them were actually "engineering" much of
anything.
It led to:
- Salary Comp. confusion ("why am I only making XXXX? when a syseng should make
YYYYY?")
- Job Description confusion (If your "SysEng"s are customer service, then what
title do you give to the people who are ACTUALLY engineering stuff? Make it
worse by giving them "architect" type titles?
There was an ego-painful transition where we simply s/Engineer/Administrator/
across the board[1], but it was definitely the Right Thing to do.
D
[1] And I'll "own" that we/management really mishandled that transition and
some folks' feelings were hurt.
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