[SAGE] RE: System Engineer vs System Administrator (was Resume inflation)

["Jenkins, Steven" <JENKINSS@mail.etsu.edu>]

Many organizations do confuse the two jobs, but I try to be careful of
using the terms 'proactive' vs 'reactive' as it doesn't help make a
distinction.  Calling SA work 'reactive' doesn't capture much of the
proactive work SAs do (e.g., patching _before_ an incident occurs,
getting things organized so that other jobs become easier, etc).
Various certificates that include 'Engineer' in the title don't help
either.

Systems Engineer vs Systems Administrator in good job descriptions, in
my experience, has been that a System Administrator is the one who
(sometimes) designs, installs, configures, troubleshoots, and manages.
The Systems Engineer *might* get involved in design or in
troubleshooting, but is almost never involved in the actual
installation, configuration or day-to-day management.  Systems Engineers
rarely carry pagers (those that do are sometimes referred to as '3rd
level support' and their jobs are often hard to tell from Systems
Administrators).

Most of a Systems Engineer's day is spent building in some way: for
example, an SE may be coding up a time-consuming process, meeting with
application developers on ways to stress-test an application before
ordering hardware, or designing a new datacenter.

An SA will often do those things also, of course, but much of an SA's
day is spent doing care-and-feeding (of either systems or users or
both), while a System Engineer doesn't have those responsibilities.  

System Engineering is a specialization of System Administrator; for
example, an SA team might have someone who is the 'tool builder',
focusing on automating processes, or someone who handles the design
(e.g., so-and-so is our Visio expert as well as the most organized and
detailed, so let's have her design the new floor plan).  Small shops
especially might not make a title distinction.

Jennifer just mentioned Sales, and there is such a thing (at some
places) as a Sales Engineer as well.  That's often different from
Systems Engineering, too, though, as their main job is helping Sales get
the job done (they may do some design for a customer, but they typically
don't write code, for example).

As for LISA, I would certainly view most of the 'tools' presentations at
LISA as Systems Engineering, but most of the 'war stories and case
studies' are Systems Administration.  In any case, Systems Engineering
is a specialized sub-field of System Administration (along with other
sub-fields of managing large deployments, determining and communicating
policy, budgeting and planning, etc).

Some places may view Engineering as more desirable than Administration,
but I think those who hold that view don't carefully distinguish between
the two (and are confused because of various certificate programs).
Unless certificate vendors change, many places will continue to be
confused.  When talking with HR and headhunters, I found it helpful to
say Engineers 'build' and Administrators 'do'.  You need to be careful,
though, if you say "This Systems Administration job requires an XXSE
certificate".

Compensation is a different issue.  I find it helpful to view Systems
Engineer alongside both Development and System Administration for salary
comparisons.  You are certainly correct that junior automations people
(ie, Systems Engineers) are needed, as are senior Operations people.  

I have found, though, that far more people who end up 'Systems
Engineers' are experienced Systems Administrators and work into that
role than there are junior 'developers' hired into Systems Engineering
(and try to then grow into good System Engineers without at some point
spending some time as System Administrators).  I think this also
contributes to System Engineering being viewed as 'more desirable' (and
more highly compensated in many cases -- the more experienced people
demand higher salaries).  

Steven


-----Original Message-----
From: Trey Harris [mailto:trey@eecs.harvard.edu] 

(Of course many sites believe that with seniority comes less operations
and more automation, but that merely *tends* to be true in
reality--there are very good uses for junior automations people and
senior operations
people.)

I think this is wrapped up with the topic that spawned it.  In this
case, it's job title inflation.  It's not as bad today as the dot-com
years when demanding any job title you wanted and getting it was pretty
common.  But we've still been left with the idea that a "System
Engineer" is a more desirable job title than "System Administrator."

Let me put the question this way: can anyone give me a definition of the
two terms that are:

a) mutually exclusive (or at least less than 50% overlapping);
b) actually would describe how these terms are used in the job market;
c) and would not declare virtually every topic of the Annual System
   Administration Conference (i.e. LISA) to be about System Engineering
   rather than Administration?

If not, it's plain inflation--Engineering sounds more impressive than
Administration.

Trey