Eight sets of hands

A switch arrives in a rack because a long sequence of people did their jobs. Someone decided what it should be. Someone moved it through a to a . Someone sold it, and someone else answered for whether it would actually work. Someone deployed it, someone runs it, someone answers the phone when it stops, someone watches it for an adversary, and someone taught every one of those people what they know.

That sequence is a fact about the industry rather than a way of organising a list, and it is the spine of The Roles:

made → moved → sold → deployed → run → supported → defended → taught

A new job arrives and the path says where it belongs.

Three standards bodies agree that a title is not a job

The most useful thing the research turned up was a point three separate institutions make independently.

records that work roles are distinct from jobs and occupations. CISA goes further and lists the titles one work role is advertised under: network administrator, network analyst, network designer, network engineer, network systems engineer, telecommunications specialist. One body of work, six names. And says of change enablement that in product-focused organisations the practice is integrated into daily work and automated — so it may be no job title at all.

Comparing two job descriptions tells you about two companies' vocabularies. Comparing what each role answers for tells you about the work.

What a job answers for, and what it is measured on

Every entry in the corpus keeps those apart, because in every job worth describing they differ — and the distance between them is the difficulty.

  • A systems engineer answers for technical accuracy and is measured on revenue. Those point the same way only while the truth is favourable.
  • A project manager answers for the truth of the schedule and is measured on delivering it.
  • A consultant answers for independence and is measured on fee income and repeat engagements.
  • An auditor answers for independence too, and spends it by being helpful.

The pattern that appeared five times

Written independently, from different sources, five roles landed on the same thing.

The channel systems engineer succeeds when partner engineers stop needing to call. The high-touch support role succeeds when incidents stop happening. The consultant does the best available work when the answer is that no programme is needed. The talent development manager who trains for capability rather than attendance reports quieter numbers. The community manager succeeds when members answer each other.

Roles whose success reduces their own visible activity are systematically under-measured, and every one of them needs somebody senior who understands that before the numbers arrive.

If you hold one of these jobs, that sentence is worth having ready before the review rather than during it.

The tiers exist twice

An engineer saying "it went to L2" is describing one of two entirely different events, depending on which company they work for.

Inside the customer, the ladder begins at a service desk that exists so the routing knowledge lives in one place rather than in every head. Inside the , it runs second line, then third line, then the developers. A case crosses between the two ladders at the point where the organisation running the product asks the organisation that made it — and third line is that boundary, the only role that touches both.

Grades run across all of it

A grade is orthogonal to a role: the same title exists at four of them, and the same four exist in every group.

What changes between grades is the size of the question you are handed — a defined task, a known problem, an undefined problem, or a problem the organisation has yet to name. Brazilian practice names all three of the common grades, júnior, pleno, sênior; several English-speaking markets name the first and the third and leave the middle to be described by what a person has stopped being. Pleno is the more useful word, because it states the thing directly.

Above senior the ladder forks. The levels page covers the management arm, the technical arm, and the question worth asking before choosing: how long is the technical arm here, and who is currently at the top of it.

Where these jobs are

Every organisation of any size now runs infrastructure, so every one of them contains these roles. A bank employs network engineers, a hospital employs security analysts, a farm employs somebody who owns the connectivity between the silos and the office.

The technology industry is no longer where most technology workers are employed. The vendors, distributors and integrators on this path are a minority of the people doing the work.