What do I do?

September 9, 2010 10:07 AM

This is yet another question regarding job titles. With the huge cuts last year and the lack of a state budget so far this year (much less a university budget), this is a nervous time for my coworkers and I. My official title is "Systems Engineer" which (to me) is so broad of a title that dozens of different positions actually fall under this category. Let me list some of my actual responsibilities and ask you for a more accurate job title.

My primary responsibility is ALL of the publicly available computers in our department. This covers roughly 250 PCs, running the gamut from a totally locked down version of XP (browsers, office viewers, pdf viewer, and nothing else), up through full Office and Adobe suites available to university affiliates. I created the base image, security model, software restrictions, software allowances, patching schedule, etc. All of this is managed through your bog standard windows tools: AD, Group Policy, SCCM (née SMS) and so on.
(And of course, these need to be secured against novice users clicking on every popup they see, as well as bored CS students trying to root the systems and everything in between... all while ensuring access to the huge number of third party content we subscribe to.)

Secondary responsibilities include higher level support for 700ish staff PCs when the first line of defense is stumped or otherwise unavailable.

Here's the catch: Do to internal politics, my group has *no* server access. At all. Ever.

So. What is a more accurate job title?

posted by Barmecide to work & money (7 answers total)

I'd call you a sysadmin. If the connotations of server access in that title bother you, I'd run with Endpoint Systems Administrator.
posted by bfranklin at 10:13 AM on September 9, 2010

I wouldn't call you a sysadmin, you're right, the current title is too braod, I'd go more end user support. Maybe Desktop Support, End User Specialist, or something like that. Since your focus is decktops and not servers.
posted by Blake at 10:22 AM on September 9, 2010

I'd call you a sysadmin. If the connotations of server access in that title bother you, I'd run with Endpoint Systems Administrator.

The sysadmin title doesn't bother me, I just don't think it's applicable to this position.

I've had Systems Administration positions in the past, and would love to segue into that role here as well, but for this current position it just cannot happen.
posted by Barmecide at 10:33 AM on September 9, 2010

IT Administrator
posted by royalsong at 10:42 AM on September 9, 2010

In my company I am a "Senior Systems Engineer". I primarily support SharePoint installs and help my managers manage two Systems Administrators who do day to day server build and support tools integration, R&D and other support tasks to our users and developers, both in projects and ongoing maintenance and support. In any given week we may coordinate with our Systems guys to actually build the servers (from scratch), with Networking to get VLANs and IP addresses provisioned, and/or configure or plan configurations for production server farms (either by doing dry runs and documenting the process and results or by planning the change through our change control process and doing the reconfiguration work in production).

I also do something that is more akin to Systems Architecture, in that I see technical or integration or technically-driven business process issues coming, do analysis, requirements gathering, R&D and planning to try to head that stuff off at the pass and proactively deal with a potentially burgeoning problem.

Also also, I do a lot of analysis, design, organization, etc. for the servers and server farms my team already has responsibility for. I just finished an analysis of all 115 or so servers for basic stats which we're using as a baseline to configure a new systems management solution that our Systems guys want us to start using. This involved listing all the servers, categorizing them (farm, function, role), writing about closely related configurations/requirements and listing all the baseline server/application installs required on each server. This drew from a lot of institutional knowledge I already had but required me to talk with the right people to clarify my understanding of weird little side projects that not all of the team supports.

Also, every single person in my team does 3rd or 4th level IT Helpdesk support for users with really weird integration issues, usually between client configurations and servers. This involves R&D to reproduce the issues and R&D/troubleshooting to fix them, as well as reasonable customer service skills and communications skills to implement either an organization-wide fix for a global issue or an individual-specific fix for an individual user with configuration issues.

Because of my analytical/organization/management/networking/architecture skills I am being considered for promotion within my group to "Technical Lead" which requires those skills.

In my employing organization, my counterparts in the Systems group have Systems Engineers titles and do exactly what you do. Some of them are also called "Deskside Support Engineers" as an additional title to Systems Engineers.
posted by kalessin at 11:42 AM on September 9, 2010

Desktop Design or Desktop Architect
posted by Admira at 3:41 PM on September 9, 2010

Student PCs? No server access?

Helpdesk Monkey.
posted by obiwanwasabi at 4:40 PM on September 10, 2010