I think this entire discussion is that reminder that naming things is hard…
Just a couple of things about title that I have found important.
1) The prefix and suffix matter. What this means is that we tend to look at an
Engineer title as being higher than an Administrator title and don’t get me
started on Jr vs Sr, vs Director etc.
2) What I tend to see the center part of the title used for is where people fit
in the stack. Frequently, what many people are calling a DevOps Engineer is
someone I would consider to be an Application Operations Engineer. In other
cases, that person is a Software Engineer, and you are trying to denote that
they have Operations responsibilities by calling them a DevOps Engineer. It is
a hard mix. Do I agree with the title of DevOps Engineer? No, because it is,
IMHO, akin to calling someone an Agile Engineer. With that said, If calling
someone an DevOp is going to give them the sway in the organization to make
change happen, lets call them an DevOp.
3) The other part that we kind of hinted at internally but is actually super
important externally, is money. By changing your title from Systems Engineer to
DevOps Engineer, it may make it easier to make that next $20k a year job change
in 6 months.
Just a few thoughts...
— cwebber
On May 9, 2014, at 7:49 AM, Derek Balling <dr...@megacity.org> wrote:
>
> 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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