EDIT: I just wanted to add an edit and say I really appreciate how active this post got. I was kind of expecting to get no responses, but instead I’m getting an incredibly detailed discussion with a wide range of viewpoints and considerations that I wouldn’t have otherwise thought of. You guys rock! Lemmy rocks!
Hey, all
I need help identifying a job title that would best match my current job responsibilities. For reference, I work at a smaller org that just had a compensation study done and my position was marked as needing no change. My supervisor was angry with that outcome and found out that it is because my actual Job Title is not an industry standard, so the company that did the study had trouble matching it up. My supervisor believes I should be making a fair chunk more than I make, as I am the sole person in my position and the work I do keeps the org running in all ways.
So, my supervisor is starting the process to reclassify me into new position and wants to make sure the title and responsibilities match up in a way that are recognizable on a resume to other potential employers. I’ve done some initial research and I believe that “Senior DevOps Engineer” or a flat “Senior Software Engineer” would probably be the best match.
A list of my responsibilities are:
- I investigate, troubleshoot, code, schedule, and deploy new custom programming releases to our ERP software. It’s a delivered ERP software that has the ability to create, package, and deploy custom coding in order to add functionality that the org needs but the delivered solution does not support. Our org is especially heavily customized - we have well over 200 different customization’s that I support
- I code, deploy, and support data integrations with third party vendors via SFTP, HTTP API, or other options (although most of the integrations come down to either pulling data from our system to push to an SFTP server or an API).
- I build and deploy custom applications on an ad hoc basis to fill needs by our org. An example of this would be that earlier this year we found out that the budget entry portion of our ERP software wasn’t available as it used a user interface that had reached end-of-life and we needed a way for departments to enter their budgets for the upcoming FY to buy time until we could get the proper user interface up and running. I was able to build a web application that could fulfill the requirements and coordinated with our systems administration team to get a server set up with certs, a proper domain name, and the like.
- I act as a general administrator for our ERP software, providing support and guidance on specific functions that members of our Org use as well as backing up our actual ERP Technical Administrator in maintenance tasks if he is sick or out.
- I support the deployment of data from our transactional ERP system to a reporting database and our reporting software. This is largely automated and works without interference. If new data is needed, I go in and make the necessary changes to include the new data in the reporting database.
- We don’t currently have any other developers, but my boss and I have started pushing to expand our slate as other members of our team retire. If we ever do get more developers, it will be my responsibility to train them and coordinate their tasks.
In general, I feel like I identify more as a Senior Software Engineer. I like the programming work more and, if I ever left this current org, it’s the job I would go for. However, for the sake of actually matching the position, I feel like the wide range of development, administrative, and automation duties, that I am more doing the job of a DevOps Engineer.
I’ve done a fair amount of reading, but I wanted to get the opinions of some peers and see if you all had any insights or opinions
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Don’t put yourself into the DevOps category if you can help it. In the context of hiring / hr, DevOps is a marketing term with little to no actual meaning. As it goes with marketing terms, they iterate with the times and often rather quickly. If FAANG publishes a blog post about “stop doing DevOps, do X” today, 90% of DevOps positions will disappear from the market tomorrow.
Software Engineer is a very generic role that will serve you for longer, especially if your company puts a lot of stock into titles, as it seams like they do. Also, from my experience, Software Engineers get paid more.
I used to be in a relatively similar position years ago so I totally relate to what you’ve got to do on a daily basis.
These are the the titles that come to my mind (leaving ths seniority level up to you):
- Software engineer
- Software engineer in Integrations
- Software engineer in Enterprise Applications
- ERP Implementation consultant
These are some good considerations.
The “Senior” piece felt weird since, while I am responsible for 100% of the programming and coordination of tasks, I don’t really oversee or help train or guide any other developers. I think the main reason that Senior was considered to be put on the title was to ensure that HR doesn’t try and under-value the position again - as our org would run into some major crises if this position is ever left empty for longer than a week or two.
Senior and Principal don’t necessarily have to be managerial. They are often used for individual contributors as well and are just a way to denote you have more experience and expertise in your field.
I second this. I lead a team of engineers, and to us the main dividing line between senior and not senior is if you’re able to take on a project and lead it autonomously. I.e., you’ve gone past the stage where all you do is take on the next ticket in your task tracker; you have an awareness and understanding of the bigger picture, which allows you to create tickets on your own and select the most appropriate thing to work on next. The lead (me) is still there to help prioritize, fetch requirements, unblock things, etc, but it’s fairly light touch management.
(Edit: my job title is Principal Software Engineer)
It sounds like you’ve got enough familiarity with the whole development lifecycle, as applied to a smaller single-dev-sized project, that you’d be great as an SDE 2 at a larger company, ready within a few years to step up to Senior. There are companies with hundreds of developers who only rarely hire straight out of college, where your level of experience is exactly what they want.
(There are also companies with hundreds of developers who do hire straight out of college, and I’m not trying to disillusion recent grads.)
This is good to know. Our org doesn’t have multiple engineers, so I don’t think that the multiple levels would really fit, but SDE (Software Development Engineer?) may be a good match. Probably not a senior since I only have experience on single-dev projects?
Although your current role wouldn’t seem very senior at a large organizational, “senior“ is a relative term and at this company it seems like you are the engineer with ownership responsibilities over the end-to-end software development of a production system. So it might still be reasonable to use a senior title if there are other benefits
Definitely. My thinking is that it would make it harder for HR to undervalue the position and, if we ever do get to hire additional developers, they will be looking to me / whoever is already in my position, in a senior / junior type fashion - at least for a solid chunk of time.
That’s right. I know I was thrown off by large projects earlier in my career. The more you learn the stronger you get at understanding and packaging/setting-aside larger and larger pieces of a project. Bigger projects stress this ability in new ways. I think I lost a job in 2016 because I couldn’t stretch my brain around something bigger, at a small business with maybe 14 devs.
This might be a bad way to communicate this, and I think I’m taking this in a weird direction, but: I’ll use the Mozilla project as an example of a large project, though I’ve never looked at its source.
Suppose you were in an interview, and due to the specifics you are expected to be fast and fluent with the same technologies used in the Mozilla project, though you’ve never looked at the source before. Given a machine with the source already checked out and open in an IDE, you have one hour to read through the source and familiarize yourself with it, so you can answer questions about how you would approach adding features or test coverage.
What I want to know is: how high does your heart rate go? Does it go up just a little, as expected for a high stakes situation? Or does it go up a lot, because you honestly have no idea how much another dev in your situation would be expected to accomplish, so you have no clue what “good enough” looks like?
This is a crappy example because no interviewer could ever actually use this metric. But I’d say if it goes up a lot, for the reason I gave, you might not be ready for senior. And by this metric, it might not ever be possible to grow to “senior” without working at a company with large multi-team projects. But I think that’s accurate.
Don’t let yourself be put of by peoples expectations. Most Senior Engineers have no idea that “engineer” is in their job description and which would not accomplish anything if you’d take away their Stackoverflow and ChatGPT.
Senior is a title that is generally measured either by an individuals ability to sit on a chair for a long enough time or by its ability to make friends with management. Skill or knowledge overall has little to do with it.
Senior engineer sounds about right.
How many years of experience do you have (both in total and in this org/position)? Also, can you estimate how much value you’ve brought to the org? Example: if the web app you wrote was not made, what would the loss be?
Total: ~7 years, ~3.5/4 of those were at the current org and the last 1.5 years of that I have been the sole programmer as the other programmers that we used to have retired and were never replaced.
Also, can you estimate how much value you’ve brought to the org? Example: if the web app you wrote was not made, what would the loss be?
This is hard for me to quantify. The web app, for example, was built out of necessity because we are required to provide our full budget to the state that we’re in on a rigid timeline. If the web app wasn’t there, somebody would have had to manually poll the different departments for their full list of budget categories and their costs and then they would have had to manually go in and enter in that data line-by-line which would have taken a significant amount of time. The only way to enter data through the existing user interface (the one we do still have) is through a text editor screen that lets you manually modify data line by line, but can go awry if lines accidentally get moved up or down or the data entered doesn’t match the internal format that the application expects.
That’s kind of why my supervisor is pushing this so hard. She believes that, ultimately, every major procedure that would cost our Org significant time and money to have held up due to a technical issue, such as payroll, budgeting, and state/federal reporting to name a few, rely on whoever is in my position to be available at a moment’s notice. Ideally, we’d have multiple people performing these duties, but she hasn’t been able to get that idea sold to higher ups.
Yeah, Senior Software Engineer is a good match then.
Works about right for the workload, responsibilities and the YOE.
The reason I asked about the impact/value is that it’s a good way to argue your case. If you can quantify ‘x’ hours of manual effort (and the estimate should be an average person doing the work, not the best case), then you can start arguing using these numbers to show that you bring value to the org.
While it sounds like your supervisor seems to be pretty solid, it’s possible you’ll eventually sit down with someone esle who’ll be deciding the final ‘value’ of your effort and would have a vested interest in paying as little as possible. For that conversation, whenever it may happen, you need to be fully prepared. That’s going to involve hard number. Effort saved, value created, costs saved etc. It’s difficult, but it’s a useful dataset to have.
I’ve worked in smaller orgs like this in the past, and it’s occasionally an uphill battle to get paid commiserate to the value you bring to the table. It’s a good reminder for management that you’re not easily replaceable and that they need to kep you interested enough that you don’t wander off.
I appreciate your advice! I’ll definitely work on getting the hard numbers to help my supervisor out. She’s been pushing for this for a while, so hopefully I can provide some materials to aid her.
I’ve had to do this before for a former job where I went from a Team Lead on a Helpdesk that started coding tools to help improve our agents metrics and the availability and accuracy of reporting to management and agents. Our helpdesk had no developers, but I was able to show how our team went from spending ~10,000 man hours a year on manually running reports to send to agents and management and only having the reports available weekly to having all of it automated and updated daily for everybody that needed them. So, I can adapt the methodology I used for that to the current org as well.
CTO
Ah, Chief Throwaway Oppenheimer. A worthy title
