I was a Systems Engineer (with progressive title levels) for 30 years (starting in 1966) with you-know-who, so I became a little curious about the exact meaning of the title. Over the years I discovered there was really no specific meaning to it. I am an electrical engineer but no one ever checked on that as a condition for the title. Other Systems Engineers (for the same BIG company) had various backgrounds and most were not Engineers in a University sense or license sense. We were usually known as SEs within the industry.
As a general view (at that time, when the industry was younger and different) the SEs often formed a link between the practical customer world (meaning technical management, sysprogs, programmers, etc) and the home company processes (software development, blue sky marketing, technical support, etc, etc). It was a good job and, in my opinion, it is a bit unfortunate that the particular niche has mostly disappeared. Some of us were more on the systems programming side (myself), some a bit on the technical hardware side (myself also, but this was not common), some on the mostly marketing side, etc, etc. It was a slightly random mixture but seemed to work well at the time-----but that was too many years ago! Today, I think one can flip coins to decide on a particular meaning for the title. Bill Ogden ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
