Finding content in your job title

Fri Apr 2 16:25:12 UTC 2010

-----Original Message-----
From: Jimi Thompson [mailto:jimi.thompson at gmail.com] 
Sent: Friday, April 02, 2010 9:20 AM
To: Jorge Amodio; Jeroen van Aart
Cc: nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Re: Finding content in your job title

On 3/31/10 8:14 PM, "Jorge Amodio" <jmamodio at gmail.com> wrote:

>> I agree with the misuse of the term "Engineer" in IT. I think it 
>> should only be used for the "official" protected title of civil 
>> engineer. Which I believe is a very respectable job. Sad but true, in 
>> IT too many people have some form of engineer in their job title but are almost totally clueless.
> 
> [ X-Operational_Content = 0 ]
> 
> Can't resist.
> 
> When I read your message it brought back to my memory a nice guy that 
> used to work for me eons ago, very clever, smart and hands-on, he had 
> a Bachelor's Degree in Psychology.
> 
> One day, we had some sort of outage and I found him in the "computer 
> room" sitting in front of one of the racks with some routing gear, I 
> still have that image in my memory he looked like he was doing some 
> sort of group therapy with the routers, I couldn't resist and told him 
> "Hey Joey, Freud won't help you, get your butt off of the chair and 
> follow the default procedure, power cycle the damn beast".
> 
> There were also several folks with various degrees in Physics, experts 
> on blowing up stuff.
> 
> Again, IMHO, in this field a title may help or may provide others a 
> relative idea where you fit in a large organization, or help the HR 
> folks know how much to put on your paycheck or what kind of 
> benefits/perks go associated with that level, but I still believe that 
> substance is more important.
> 
> Regards
> Jorge
> COOK
> Chief Old Operations Knucklehead
> 

>HAH!  My self chosen job title is Chief Pest, Annoyer of Developers, and Destroyer of Misconceptions.  All in all, it's fairly accurate.  Among other things I manage a team of developers, I often have to disabuse management of some silly idea or other, and > frequently have to play gladfly to enable change.  

When I call a company and ask for an accountant, I get the companies accountant, when I ask for an account manager, that's what I get. That's what titles are, and that's why they are important. I know the type of person I need to talk to, but I don't know who it is I need to talk to. Its why standardization in titles is good, when I go digging through my pile of business cards looking for the Network Engineer/Architect at company X, I'll probably not notice a custom/weird title. It does not define you, it does not make you any less or more important, it does however answer the question of "Who is responsible for..." which I believe to be extremely valuable.

Then again, I might be weird.

~J