Citizen Coder? Happiness Concierge? Here come 2023's business cards Information technology has a long tradition of making up new job titles to emphasize how futuristic we all are. Who can forget IBM's Worldwide Head Of Objects? And check LinkedIn for Evangelists, Jedis, Ninjas, Prophets, Gurus and other uncomfortable appropriations, often modified with cringe abstractions like Innovation, …
And I claim my five pounds.
As for migration, constantly....
Stop it. Stop it right now. Having someone who's job it is, is to keep merging, splitting and remerging stacks onto various platforms for the sake of what? Vanity?
For larger companies, the pain is real, it's like constantly moving house. For those who live in a one bedroom flat, that's not so problematic but when you have a 5 bedroom mansion complete with garden shed, 3 car garage and multiple loft-spaces constantly moving just makes everything worse. Stuff gets lost, things misplaced, people get fed up and move off, and by the time you've unpacked the last box you're moving again (and throwing away the nice plates while you're at it... Maybe a new car too....who needs CD collections anyway? Etc... You get the idea).
Anyways... No. Just no.
Is it that time again for the horse pills nurse? Mines the one with the fetching straps on the sleeves.
not that long ago, I had to manage a reputable estate agent (are there any) through selling a 10-bedroom house, as their in-house designed system didn't cater for anything over 6. the a week later a 45 bedroom £85m mansion came on the market in Guildford.
you'd be lucky to get 6 for £85m nowadays
My house has 6 bedrooms
And how many rooms or flatlets for your staff? Your butler, the misses' ladies maid as well as the housekeeper, groundsman/gardener, nanny, chauffeur, cook and house maid. That's the difference between a big house and a mansion.
Also how many acres does your 6 bed spread reside in? It's not just the house that makes a mansion.
We trained hard—but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams we were reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing, and what a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while actually producing confusion, inefficiency, and demoralization.
Petronius Arbiter
Job titles like these are an excellent way of identifying companies you want to avoid working for, as they're guaranteed to be populated by people who spend all day yapping into their iPhones whilst failing to get their 50 lines of javascript running on a distributed hybrid cloud based virtualised Kubernetes container.
Or units within companies; we have some internal teams which like to assign these sorts of titles, and I try to avoid their communications lest I injure myself due to excessive eye-rolling.
Another particularly obnoxious one is "warrior". We used to have a marketing guy who kept sending out dispatches to his "Social Media Warriors". Manages to be simultaneously offensive to people who have actually been in combat, and people who are opposed to it. Brilliant.
I may be wrong. But looking at the IT world from the edges it seems to me that it works best when they're collaborating not warring.. Inf act too often when stuff goes tits up it's because they neglected to cooperate.Particularly to cooperate with the poor sods who have to use what they come up with.
I went into a McDonalds in Chicago back at the end of the last Century (Gulp! I'm old!). Between the serving counter and the cooking area was a large open space which had the words "War Zone" emblazoned on the floor in giant orange letters.
I remember thinking that I'd not want to work for any manager who did that. And that there'd probably be a "combat briefing" before each shift, where their dear leader would impart them his words of wisdom (probably with added quote from Sun Tzu) in a hideous motivational speech.
I wonder if he called himself Brigadier Burger?
.... Pumpkin Carver Extraordinaire* in my email sig for the last 3 years, and nobody has commented ..... though I must admit that the font size is 1 point!
I also have that I'm ISO 3103 certified.
But for a job title I've always fancied "Bit Herder & Prosecutor of Electrons"!
*This involved winning a pumpkin carving competition run across the many companies occupying the large (ex-IBM) site that we are based on.
We all know 95% of development time is consumed by developer trying to figure out how to call their entities like projects, apps, functions, variables, classes.
[developer] Hey Steve, I've been trying to come up with a temporary variable for this for loop. I am thinking of "i", but it seems like this has been used all over the place and I would like something more meaningful like "index" or even "index_of_the_thing". It's such a conundrum, could you please help me out?
[Steve, the entity naming consultant] Just call it "i" and forget about it.
[developer] Thank you, Steve.
[Steve] No need, it's literally my job.
@Rupert_Goodwins
Quote: "...networks ever faster, end-to-end encryption, data sovereignty considerations, robustness, disaster recovery, and security management, there can be so many edges..."
Rupert, you forgot about the job titles which are invented to pacify the multitudes....jobs which never existed, and never will exist:
(1) Proton Privacy Protector (or PPP as their friends call them!)
(2) GCHQ Cybersecurity Advisor (...no...I won't be inviting one of these to my site!! Guess why? Yup...the title exists, but that's not what they do!)
(3) Anti-Slurp Specialist (...they needed one of these at the Royal Free Trust...but then Google came along!)
(4) Anti-Slurp Specialist (...desperately needed at NHS England as we speak!)
(5) Scanning Detectorist (Well....we -- the great unwashed -- do need this job and this title, but I guess there's absolutely no corporate...or government...demand for such a job!)
.....but the one I like the best, and the one LEAST likely to get any traction at all is:
(6) Bullsh*t Exploder (Public figures, politicians, venture capitalists.....they will all fight to the death to ensure that this job never becomes prevalent!!)
.....and I'm sure that other El Reg commentards can do much better than this........
P.S. Can't someone apply AI and come up with a robot version of item #6?? Problem though....the AI would produce TOO MUCH INFORMATION!!!
"(2) GCHQ Cybersecurity Advisor (...no...I won't be inviting one of these to my site ... "
The modern equivalent is NCSC (CCP) Security & Information Risk Advisor (and yes, they can't spell 'adviser' either).
I am one (at lead level) and it was the toughest qualification I've ever had to undertake. It involved submission for anonymous assessment of a 50+ page document including full career summary, all publications, and examples of actual achievements across 25 skill domains (nine at management level, 12 at senior practitioner level), followed by a searching two hour interview by two accredited experts. I've also acted as assessor and interviewer for this qualification, and the general standard has been pretty high (in my opinion fully justifying the title) - not at all comparable to the plethora of bullshit business management role designations.
Hmmm... forty-odd years ago I applied for a job with a major UK company which asked among other things: Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? How about your parents? And how about their parents?
This was not a military company... twenty years later I actually found myself in the position in which it might have been important.
I was a "Data Processor". Since it was just me, I then got promoted to "Data Manager". As this included photocopying stuff and making tea, I had a few cards made up that said "Dogsbody".
These days I refer to myself as "Chief Bog Scrubber" [*]. People who are obsessed with job titles are not people I care to waste time attempting to communicate with.
* - This is actually true. After some bad experiences, I do geekery as a hobby, not a job. The stress of ever changing goals, sales promising the impossible, and endless meetings to massage the ego of a project manager that doesn't even know the names of the people he's managing...fuck all of that. I do my 9-5 in return for (mediocre) pay, and any time outside of that is mine. No thoughts about work, no "on call", no agitated emails or phone calls because somebody can't deal with something and needs an emotional punching bag. Fuck that. I'll take less pay in return for more happiness.
Something relatively recent (to me, anyway) is the journey down the org chart of the partial title "Director". It used to be just top brass - the people who'd get banged up if the company killed someone - but now we see "Director" in the titles of people a couple of ranks down. Where I work we have a "Director" of our department, who does what my dad would have called "admin". He's alright, nice enough bloke in a horrible job; when he tells you he Used To Be A Techie you can see he dies a little inside each time. But that greasy pole won't climb itself* - onward and upward to the Senior Head Chief Lead First Gold Director of Supervisory Management Direction Oversight.
Self-climbing greasy poles? There's a pitch for VC funding for you!
I worked for a US multi-national twenty years ago. Looking at the US org-chart we had an awful lot of Vice Presidents. But there was a magic word. If your job title was something-executive, then you were low as a snake's belly. But if your job title was Executive-somethingorother, then you were top of the tree. So at some point they'd introduced executive vice president to mean the actual people on the track to becoming president of some large department. Which has always seemed odd, as surely there can only be one President?
Perhaps at some point The Quickening will happen, and they will all be called to fight with swords until that happens. At which point the survivor presumably kills the CEO and takes over...
In Europe we had a President with a board of vice presidents. But in the individual countries we had boards of directors and managing directors in charge.
In the UK if you are described as a director, say in an org chart, or have "Director" on your business card then it is considered reasonable for people outside the company with whom you do business to assume that you speak for the company as a director and, as such, can legally commit the company. This is whether or not you are registered as a director for the company with Companies House. I assume that's why VP is taking over as the preferred title in many companies here in the UK.
"Now we have the flexibility of continuous development and web services, a regular stack audit across an organization will steer it away from the bad habits that make migrations necessary at all"
Wrong. Web blah-blah, microservices blah-blah, devops blah-blah, continuous [development/integration/testing/deployment/etc.].
None of this eliminates migrations. Company X stops supporting Product A, or jacks up the price, or refuses to relicense under the old, per-CPU basis, ("Use our subscription service!"), or goes out of business, or your business' needs change ... and you need to migrate.
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I worked at a place that started adding "Senior" to people's job titles as a way of both avoiding paying and/or overpaying salaries depending upon which dept you worked in and how flush the dept head's budget was. There wasn't a single "Junior" but it got to a point where everyone kissed arse, got their "senior" prefix and in the end there were so many "seniors" it meant nothing and all job titles had to be reverted back to plain ones without the prefix!
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