Finding content in your job title

Justin M. Streiner streiner at cluebyfour.org
Wed Mar 31 15:57:18 UTC 2010


On Tue, 30 Mar 2010, Steve Bertrand wrote:

> I'm young in the game, and over the years I've imagined numerous job
> titles that should go on my business card. They went from cool, to
> high-priority, to plain unimaginable.
>
> Now, after 10 years, I reflect back on what I've done, and what I do
> now. To me, if a business is loose-knit with no clear job descriptions
> or titles (ie. too small to have CXO etc), I feel that a business card
> should reflect what one feels is the primary job responsibility, or what
> they do the most (or love the most).

Smaller shops might be more willing to let people choose their own titles 
for their business cards.  A friend presented himself as "Lord of the 
Underworld" when he ran his own company.

At my previous job, the title on my business card was either "network 
engineer" or "senior network engineer", and that was pretty accurate, in 
the sense that most people here would probably agree that the "network 
engineer" is a pretty vague title that covers many different 
responsibilities.  Bigger companies often put a framework of job 
classifications and titles in place to simplify HR/administrative items 
like salary ranges and reporting structures.  I currently work at a 
larger organization where my business card says "network analyst" even 
though I work in the network engineering group, and my job classification 
is "systems programmer IV" even though I don't do any systems programming. 
I don't consider writing the occasional shell/perl/python script to be 
systems programming :)

> For instance, I like to present myself as a 'network engineer'. I have
> never taken formal education, don't hold any certifications (well, since
> 2001), and can't necessarily prove my worth.

I don't hold any certs at the moment either, but I can prove my worth to 
an organization through my work experience and business knowledge.  The 
"are certs worth it" horse has been pretty well beaten to death several 
times here and on other forums.

> How does the ops community feel about using this designation? Is it
> intrusive or offensive to those who hold real engineering degrees? I'm
> content with 'network manager', given that I still do perform (in my
> sleep) numerous system tasks and have to sometimes deal with front-line
> helpdesk stuff.

"Engineering" implies different things to different people.  I don't 
worry about offending a degreed engineer any more than I worry about 
offending someone who drives a train.  I had a boss at a previous job herd 
all of the systems and network engineers in the conference room and give 
us the "YOU ARE NOT ENGINEERS BECAUSE YOU DO NOT HAVE AN ENGINEERING 
DEGREE" browbeating after some sort of an outage.  He didn't last very 
long :)

jms




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