Welcome back to another edition of T-SQL Tuesday. In this month’s edition, our host Josephine Bush asks “What Do All the Database Job Titles Actually Mean?“
What Does Title [dev\null] Mean?
My answer is simple: nonsense. Seriously.
My problem with job titles is that at every organization I’ve ever worked at or with, a given job title has little real value or meaning. All a job title is, is an attempt to label a collection of job duties and responsibilities into something succinct. And in our neck of the woods, there’s a decent assortment of such titles – DB Admin, DB Dev, Dev DBA, DB Engineer, Architect, blah, blah, blah. But as I’m sure others are blogging about today, the actual duties wildly vary from company to company, for identical job titles.
I also argue that they can often be meaningless except from a prestige perspective. Early on in my career (omg, this anecdote was 20 years ago), I worked for one of the largest banks in the world. My title was “Assistant Vice President.” In reality, I was a database developer. And most of the other 100+ in my division had identical titles as well! It was in place due to salary bands being tied to titles at that organization and IT, being higher paying, had to be on the “president” track. Ridiculous.
What Does [dev\null] Mean to YOU?
One thing I started doing in the course of my career is that when I’d interview, one of my counter-questions would be “what does [job title] mean to you?” followed by “what are the duties, tasks, and day-to-day for [job title] at this organization?”
I remember one place I was interviewing for an “Architect” role. But the job description’s was more fitting for a T-SQL developer & performance tuning expert. And I was right. They defined “Architect” totally differently than how I would. So we pivoted our conversation on the actual needs and tasks and the day-to-day.
So What Does Matter?
In my opinion, job titles are meaningless. For me, the only thing that does matter is what set of duties are expected and most importantly, whether the pay is proper for what is being expected.
“Call me a data janitor for all I care, as long as the paycheck clears the bank.”
Thanks for reading – happy T-SQL Tuesday!
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