[Discuss] What is my work title?
Jerry Natowitz
What I do, and have been doing for two companies since 2000, is to manage the computer systems and operating systems that are incorporated into large manufactured systems.
My first job involved working with Sun Microsystems and SunSoft. I managed overlapping migrations from UltraSPARC II and IIi based systems to UltraSPARC III, Solaris 2.5.1 to Solaris 8, and from OpenBoot 2.X to 3.X.
Along with expected changes in software build procedures, software installation, and physical changes due to size differences, I also dealt with a number of systems issues:
1) We were experiences a much higher rate of UltraSPARC IIi failure than SMCC would believe. After months of working with them, I discovered that they tested the CPUs in 64 bit mode, but we only ran 32 bit mode.
2) There was a PCI card developed in-house that would not work on systems using OpenBoot 3.X. Turns out that I/O space for devices behind a bridge doesn't happen at boot time, but we were taking advantage of being the last card in the bus to help ourselves to memory. OpenBoot 3.X packed the PCI space, preventing our trickery. A redesigned card resulted.
3) Performance of certain floating point routines dropped by an order of magnitude on the UltraSPARC III. SunSoft provided un released compilers and libraries to help, but ultimately I realized that 32 bit floating point arithmetic took a lot longer than 64 bit. I re-wrote the routines to do 64 bit math on 32 bit operands and all was fine again.
My current job started out similarly, but the issues are different. Migration from Solaris 2.5.1 to Solaris 8 and then to Solaris 10 and dealing with serious USB bugs in the SunFire series. Later on we migrated to GNU/Linux on x86.
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Richard Pieri
the org chart is called. It may also be a pay grade reference. Check
with your HR people if you've forgotten your formal title.
--
Rich P.
Jack Coats
> Your title has little bearing on the work you do. It's what your box on the
> org chart is called. It may also be a pay grade reference. Check with your
> HR people if you've forgotten your formal title.
>
> --
> Rich P.
The 'title' thing has been used over the years initially as a
description of your job function,
now it is a legal moniker that takes a blue-screen-powerpoint-from-HR
to describe, then
it normally doesn't make sense.
For Sysadmins, the group SAGE came up with titles and definitions of
what it takes to have that title years ago.
A few organizations use it, but not many in the grand scheme of
things. Also the term 'engineer'
in many states is a legal term, as does 'doctor' or 'architect' or
'Reverend' (and the various ministerial titles),
making it illegal to use them without appropriate credentials (as
defined in state laws).
And the term 'engineer' has bee so overloaded with people trying to
add prestige, it has lost most of its meaning to the general public.
Also, I have seen (and occasionally used) functional titles at work,
vs the HR titles needed to fill
out a hierarchical org-chart for payroll/legal reasons.
... Jack
Grand Poobah of Being HMFWICH
Jerry Natowitz
title): Senior Applications Engineer. Why would I post here to get that
information?
Okay, maybe I should have said that my job is going away and I'd like
something fairly descriptive on my resume that might cause a person or
(more likely) data mining program to notice me.
Jerry Natowitz
===> j.natowitz (at) gmail.com
On 03/29/12 16:25, Richard Pieri wrote:
> Your title has little bearing on the work you do. It's what your box on
> the org chart is called. It may also be a pay grade reference. Check
> with your HR people if you've forgotten your formal title.
>
Richard Pieri
>
> Okay, maybe I should have said that my job is going away and I'd like something fairly descriptive on my resume that might cause a person or (more likely) data mining program to notice me.
Yes, that does change my inferred context.
Your resume should say "Senior Applications Engineer" in the "title" section, because that is your formal title, along with a more descriptive title. It's like resume where I have "Senior Systems Administrator/Assistant Vice President" for my last gig because SSA was my title when I was hired and AVP was what it was changed to when we got acquired by a bank. I frequently had to explain bank titles to prospective employers. Omitting or falsifying your job title can be seen as a significant lie, one that will get you dropped from a hiring manager's prospects lists as soon as it is discovered. It will be discovered when they run background checks.
It wouldn't hurt to ask your HR people to formally change your title to something more descriptive and relevant before the position disappears. Once you figure out what that is, anyway. Looks a lot like "System Administrator" to me. Managing computer systems is what SAs do. Suggest to HR that your title be formally changed to "Senior Systems and Applications Engineer" (or Administrator). That covers both your box on the org chart and your actual responsibilities.
It also doesn't hurt to ask hiring agents if you can remove an inappropriate formal title from the copies of your resume you send them. Sometimes they will say yes, sometimes they will say no. You won't know which until you ask.
--Rich P.
Rich Braun
resume, think of what position you want (and which ones you don't want) and
choose accordingly. Upper-level tech people eschew titles the same way they
do vendor certifications.
My own career has seen a progression of titles engineer <- manager <- director
<- vp <- president, in 5 successive jobs since 1994. Arrows added: yep, they
are in the *opposite* chronological order that most ambitious people seek in
their careers. The more comfortable you get with technology, the less you
care what people call you: and the more you get to know your intellectual
peers, the less you want to hold management authority over them. I would not
be surprised if more than one other person here on this message board has gone
through a very similar progression of titles.
Do what you want to do, get paid what you can negotiate, and let others figure
out what to call you. Most people just call me Rich. How many of us use our
titles outside the HR office, anyway?
-rich
Rich Braun
the major points have been addressed.
But here's one suggestion I've always given to people who work with me:
rather than leaving it to hearsay, run your own benchmarks. VMs are cheap, so
build two and run your favorite benchmarks to see if you can measure a
difference.
Don't know of one? Try this one, it's a trusty easy-to-compile standby:
http://sysbench.sourceforge.net/
I found that with Virtualbox running under a Linux 2.6 host, LVM was
substantially faster than bare metal (hard to explain other than that there is
some write-through caching going on at the host O/S level).
Eric Chadbourne
> Do what you want to do, get paid what you can negotiate, and let others figure
> out what to call you. Most people just call me Rich.
Great quote.
- Eric
Tom Metro
> What I do, and have been doing for two companies since 2000, is to
> manage the computer systems and operating systems that are
> incorporated into large manufactured systems.
>
Your job description sounds more like a Systems Engineer[1] than
Applications Engineer.
1. http://www.sie.arizona.edu/sysengr/whatis/whatis.html
As others have said, if you have the ability to specify a title (within
reason), and you are soon to transition jobs, then what label someone
else places on what you did is less relevant than figuring out what
title fits what you want to do, providing your employer agrees to it.
Rich Braun wrote:
> My own career has seen a progression of titles engineer <- manager <-
> director <- vp <- president, in 5 successive jobs since 1994. Arrows
> added: yep, they are in the *opposite* chronological order that most
> ambitious people seek in their careers.
This sort of "title regression" is pretty common for people who were
involved in the first dot-com bubble. I run across a fair number of
former CTOs that are now things like senior engineers.
-Tom
--
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/