Are IT Job Titles Getting Out of Control?

grudgelord asks: "Information technology jobs have always been difficult for those from non-technical disciplines to understand. However, in recent years it has become difficult for even IT professionals to divine the actual responsibilities of a given position's role as job titles become increasingly more nebulous and the descriptions more buzz-wordy. At one time, we all had a reasonable grasp of the role of a 'System Administrator' or 'Helpdesk Technician' but now such roles may actually have significant DBA or developer responsibilities bundled into a lesser job title (such as the recent trend of 'Desktop Support Techs' with SQL DBA responsibilities), often robbing the holder of a fair position (and traditionally better paid) title on the résumé. Are these trends a contrivance by corporations to get more 'value' from IT professionals by bundling responsibilities of higher paid jobs into lesser roles and to evade competitive salary by creating titles that have no analogue on pay-scale indexes? Has there ever been a proposed standard for information technology position titles (or at least some form of translation guide)? How do Slashdot job searchers contend with these wildly varying, and increasingly vague titles that seem to have saturated the industry, or worse, when they've been festooned with an inaccurate or absurd job title?"

describes my career:

• Programmer
• Lead Programmer
• Systems Administrator
• MTS (Member Technical Staff)
• MTS I (when the MTS was stratified)
• MTS II
• MTS III
• MTS IV
• Senior MTS
• MTS (when they decided to collapse the strata)
• Senior MTS (yep, re-stratified)
• Architect
• Senior Architect

Yeah, that's pretty descriptive, it's all I put on my resume and they know EXACTLY what my career was about.

I'd love to know the man-hour charges racked up scratching our collective heads about what the titles and job descriptions needed to be.

I especially loved being an architect -- I had as difficult time defining it to people as they had grasping it.

I also get (got) a kick out of people and their "I LOVE ME" walls in their offices and cubicles, pasting and taping up all of their certificates for classes they'd taken, certifications achieved, etc. In the final analysis, I don't ever see a consistent and understandable title/job description semantic, especially in IT where the landscape changes dramatically sometimes in months. (Other professions seem not much better defined, btw.) If your management is good, they're more tuned into and cognizant of what each employee does well and how to balance work loads accordingly. If they're not, they'll obsess about job titles (sometimes employees do the same, and drive management crazy).

Yes

I'm a DHCP and DNS Dominatrix. I'm not even a woman. Craziness. Pays well, though. Get to wear jeans. And a ball gag.

Blame the PHBs...

I think it's more about a manager trying to justify his position by "re-organizing" and "streamlining" positions and their descriptions. For instance, I'm a Java developer. You would think my job description would be "Senior Java Developer" or "Java Developer III" or something... no, I'm an "Information Design Specialist".

To me it doesn't affect my job or my pay, so they can call my position anything they feel like. When I choose to move on I'm still putting "Java Developer" on my resume.

General Schedule

Dig up the General Schedule (GS) tables that the Federal Government uses to pay its employees.

There is a General Schedule table w/specific requirements for pretty much any position you can think of... and it'll serve as a good starting point.

I'd also suggest you find someone who is well versed in these GS tables & pay scales, because they are not uniform & will vary by agency and geographic location.

Nothing to see here

Euphemistic, unclear, and non-standardized job descriptions are common no matter the field. Of course, it's more common in places where there is high demand and low job quality: workers at Subway are called "sandwich artists", telemarketing is "enumeration-type work".

Some job listing sites do require employers to use standardized job titles. The Government of Canada's Job Bank [jobbank.gc.ca] website uses a dewey-decimal-like National Occupation Classification [hrdc-drhc.gc.ca], so that at least you can understand what type of work is being described.

The detailed job description? Well, the devil's in the details. Read the employment contract before you sign it.

- RG>

Network Adminstrator

I've always had a beef with the "Network Administrator" title being applied to a Windows Administrator job. A network administrator keeps your LANs and WANs running, not administering a Windows exchange server. The two jobs are totally separate and a Windows administrator doesn't even come close to anything that should be called a network administrator, and vice-versa.

Some thing for dilbert

Slightly off topic, might be IT related, since it was a software thing. Guy I have met in the CS program at my school came back one day from his internship with his bosses business card. His boss was the "Director of Product Enhancements". However on the front of the card it was given as an acronym, DOPE.

For 2 reasons it was funny. One it came straight out of a Dilbert comic, the prof found it incredibly funny too.
2nd reason, apparently this manager requested that every first letter in his title be in the acronym. Originally it was just DPE. His boss apparently remains completely oblivious.

I was also suprised considering how small the company was.

Let's all face the truth....

The IT title thing jumped the shark at "Webmaster" as a real job title.

It's all been re-arranging deck chairs since then.

Seriously.

=tkk

Two Tiers

For non-managerial positions:

      Sled Dog

      Lead sled dog (same work, better view)

Well,

My (nontechnical) boss once told me he thought of me as "Mr. Go To".

I said, "fine, just don't mention it to anybody else."

My Personal Favorite

A friend of mine when presented with the option to join a startup asked for the title of 'Eyes and Ears'. Now that looked sweet on a business card.

I choose my own title

I work at a small startup. On my first trip to the datacenter, I had to fill out a form that asked for my job title. This had never come up before, so I called my boss, and after about 30 seconds of discussion, I wrote down:

Chief Technical Dude.

It's fitting & I liked it, so that's what my title is.

Though a friend of mind (in IT) had on his business card Director, Piratical Affairs. Which is better.

Old trick by H-1B agencies

H-1B agencies are natorious for manipulating job titles. This allows them to bring in avdanced experts and pay them shit.

One meaningless title I've been seeing

I work in Tech Support, and I've been in the job market for a while now. (Outsourcing; go fig!) I've been seeing ads for "Help Desk Analyst" for the past few months. Checking, they have nothing to do with tech support or work on any help desk. Instead, a help desk analyst goes over support tickets to see what the average call time is, how many calls it takes to close it and so on. It's nothing more or less than a bean counter second-guessing the techs and trying to squeeze as many calls into each poor sod's work day as possible.

Slashdot "Editor"

Need we say more?

W hat is going on?

In response to this post [slashdot.org]

I have the same problem. My "Chief Lizard Wrangler [slashdot.org]" gag is visible from my list of posts [slashdot.org], but is mislinked to a blank parent [slashdot.org]. Something weird is going on.

The Office

Ok, so does that mean I can be Assistant Regional Manager, instead of Assistant TO the Regional Manager?

Dwight

What's in a name? Criminal intent, apparently...

What gets me is that the pointy-haired types attach so much baggage to the title, like it's a cattle brand or something. Especially with the current corporate environment (thank you, Sarbanes-Oxley), the same exact job can mean two different things, depending on the title...

For example, I work for a fairly big Fortune 500 as a developer-slash-DBA-slash-webmaster (you know the drill, many hats, one paycheck). Last month, I was "Systems Development Specialist". Until they decided that anyone with "developer" in the title was an offshored cubicle dweller with all intention of getting their hands on some identities and credit cards (hey, I didn't make this generalization, don't blame me). I was already busted down from having domain admin privileges to local admin on just a few boxes (SQL server, webserver, development server, and my own PC). After the new title policy change, I was going to lose everything but the developer login, and I would even lose local privileges on my own PC. That was pretty much the last straw for me, since I figured after 7 years of pre-SOX full access, where if I'd had the will (and total lack of morals) to do so, I could have made it out of there with thousands of credit card numbers. What do they reward my loyalty with? Shackles. "Here, wear these boxing gloves when you code, it'll be harder for you to do it, but our data will be safe from your evil wicked ways!"

Anyway, as I was about to hand in my notice, my immediate supervisor, a down-in-the-trenches network guy who ended up Site IT Manager, told me he managed to get my title switched to "Senior Information Management Specialist". Guess what my job description is? Exactly the same as System Development Specialist, although couched in more generic terms to prevent any instances of "developer" or "programmer" to show up. And now I have my access back, and I don't have to have someone hold my hand and wipe my ass when I implement change controls from my dev environment to production. All because of a few words in the title, I went from criminal suspect to a functional member of the IT staff.

Abuse of the term 'engineer'

There's "Sales Engineers", and "Level One Engineers", and god only know what else. Level one is button pushing, they're TECHNICIANS - people with technical experience, who do what they're told. Then are the real ENGINEERS, who design things (the buttons that the technicians push). Then there are ARCHITECTS, who form all the stuff into a cohesive whole.

There is no "Systems Engineer II", or "Support Engineer III" - you are a technician. Push buttons, don't think.

It's not just IT

It happens everywhere (and has been for a good 5+ years now).

Basically, low-end/crap jobs are being given fancier (and fancier still) job titles because:

* They attract poseurs who can handle the low pay that goes with them as long as their job sounds impressive to their peers.
* They look impressive in a Resume (thus being an acceptable stepping-stone job - used to attract people to low-skill, high-turnover positions)
* It's easier to get people to work a bad job if it sounds important
* The cotton-wool generation just starting to get into the workforce, who have been brought up being told they can never lose and never having had their feelings hurt, don't get all depressed about "only" being a "Secretary" or something similarly mundane.

Cyberspace Engineer

Some titles during the first internet bubble got pretty out-there.

I really was handed a business card that said "Cyberspace Engineer" on it and I have to confess to bursting out laughing.

Clever guy, important work, and the title wasn't entirely bogus but yikes.

The same in Europe/Germany?

I'm a German CS student and while I'm mot going to be done for another two years I'd like to know whether the same nonsense is happening in Europe (and, more specifically, Germany). It'd be bad to enter the free market and spend the next two months trying to figure out what the hell the current name-du-jour for a Java developer is or why the hell they're offering me a job as an architect for the salary of a helpdesk technician (of course later I'd find out that "System Information Architect" is the current name for "Helpdesk Callcenter Phone Monkey").

Software engineer permutations.

A few years ago, Intel changed the title of all the software engineers working for the software automation of the fabs to automation engineers. Interesting that the management did that when there was a mandatory market adjustment (increase) in pay for software engineers for that review cycle. They changed the titles right before the cutoff date, and screwed a few thousand engineers out of a mandatory raise.

Luckily, I got out of there before they did this. Shitty though? Yes.

Hmmm....

We once had a person apply, and told us flat out that he was just looking to pad his resume - that he'd do anything we wanted - for a very low salary - if we'd just give him an impressive job title. We told him to take a walk.

You're kidding, right?

At one time, we all had a reasonable grasp of the role of a 'System Administrator' or 'Helpdesk Technician' but now such roles may actually have significant DBA or developer responsibilities bundled into a lesser job title (such as the recent trend of 'Desktop Support Techs' with SQL DBA responsibilities), often robbing the holder of a fair position (and traditionally better paid) title on the résumé.

Help desk techs doing SQL DBA work? And supposedly this is a "recent trend?" My suspicion is that it isn't a trend, but that instead some Helpdesk Tech somewhere was asked to set up system DSNs in Windows and thinks that it's SQL DBA work. There's a heck of a lot more to being a DBA than just installing SQL, setting up users and creating a DB, but it's not uncommon for people who don't understand that to think that they could do it.

Now, on to the other topic, at my current employer we have several different titles in the IT department: Helpdesk Tech, Network Engineer, Project Manager, Application Specialist, Developer, and Director. Those all seem pretty standard to me, though in a larger company the duties would be a little more granular. For example, the HelpDesk Tech job would be split out into HelpDesk Operator and PC Tech and the Network Engineer would be split into Networking Admin/Engineer and Systems Admin/Engineer, and the Developer would be split into DBA and Developer.

At most places I have worked over the past 10 years it's been basically the same breakdown, with higher or lower levels of granularity. I suspect that if you had a very small company with a very limited IT budget and owners/managers with no IT knowledge, you might get someone looking to hire a HelpDesk Tech and expect them to be able to manage everything. After all, to most users you always call the HelpDesk regardless of whether your needs are as low level as a new mouse or as high level as a boinked application server.

Now, if you're working for someone who expects you to do the work of 2 or 3 widely varying jobs for the salary of a HelpDesk tech, well, any sensible person who had the skills to do the job would either demand more money or go elsewhere. If they didn't have he skills, they could either stay and learn them or go elsewhere.

Re:Abuse of the term 'engineer'

Architects design buildings. We've designed them for thousands of years. We make, on average, significantly less than you computer nerds. Why must you take our job title as well?

Versatility is the key

In my 20 years of IT experience, I have NEVER held a position that was limited to its job description. Every job required me to take on additional responsibilities outside my defined job description. And conversely, when I hired people, it was not based solely not on their focused skills, but for their versatility and diversity of experience.