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:
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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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.
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.