On May 9, 2014, at 11:07 AM, Christopher Webber <cweb...@cwebber.info> wrote:
> 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. There’s definitely a difference between architect & admin, with engineer in there somewhere. > 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. I disagree a bit- If you’re making tooling to facilitate things like deploys, and CI, and operational dashboards to do releases, then it might be justified right away. Also, i rarely see the devops engineer come from the dev side, and they rarely are coding on the main application. It’s a fundamental difference from, say, an SRE. But really, the title Devops Engineer is a code word for jobs that will involve doing the operations work I really want to do. It’s shorthand right now for Puppet/Chef/Jenkins/etc, as I saw someone else say. It means that the company will be looking for Automation, CI practices, rapid deploys, Dev’s on a pager & such. I had to look for a job in Aug, as we moved to a new city. The first thing I spoke w/ recruiters about was looking for a linux position, and that the ideal job would probably have DevOps in the description. I ended up taking a job with devops in the title, even though it started off as an 100% Ops role. Fact is that I’m now writing ruby for at least 25+% of my week, but I’m still the only ops guys here. > 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. Or, conversely, justifying the salary.. It helps when the mgmt can talk to their peers and VC’s, and they are OK w/ the higher end saleries. _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.lopsa.org https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
