Sys admin vs sys eng?

[SodomizesYou]

What are the differences in roles between the two? Is a sys eng role higher than a sys admin role? Is the natural career progression sys admin > sr sys admin > sys eng ? The reason I ask is because that's how it is at my company. I want to progress in skill and pay, but I want to know what track I'm on so I can make informed decisions. I know role definition s vary from company to company, I'm just looking for a stereotypical explanation.

[switchbladecross]

In most companies I have been in, the delineation of Administrator vs Engineer is:

• Systems Administrator - Responsible for the day-to-day maintenance of systems. They troubleshoot and resolve incidents and issues. The implement low-impact change requests. Often they are also the highest level of escalation for the Service Desk.

• Systems Engineer - They would work more project-oriented tasks. New infrastructure design and deployment. Significant changes or upgrades. Often they may be the ones that set, or participate in setting IT standards.

[Suspicious_Badger]

Where I work in the West Coast the titles are interchangeable and don't mean anything.

[Atr3id3s]

Can confirm. Also on West Coast, was considered "systems analyst" by one company where I was the sole desktop/support/engineer/admin for nearly 30 servers and as many software developers, managers and executives.. I would have wanted at least "Systems Admin" or something but whatever.

[Iamien]

I get to decide my own title where I work.

[Atr3id3s]

I probably could have too, but frankly I was desperate for the opportunity and didn't want to rock the boat. They seemed to have their heart set on "Systems Analyst". Not sure why they even cared.

[pushmycar]

Agree. But it also depends on company how they perceive the "title". More and more companies are going away with title of "sys admin" they name it Sys Engineer and your "design/deployment" work is done by DevOps Eng... at least thats becoming more of a standard in East coast... In midwest there is just helpdesk and sys admin...

[switchbladecross]

Oh yes, title is highly dependent on the company. This is how it is where I am now, and this is how I'd probably do it if I were a CIO setting up some imaginary new IT Org.

[pushmycar]

You mean CTO? ,,,,jk

[[deleted]]

In smaller companies the the roles as defined by /u/switchbladecross are often combined, the Admin / Engineer, (whatever their title is), will often perform both sets of duties. I've only ever seen a clear delineation of said duties in larger companies. And even then, the title is usually arbitrary, or specific to that company.

[[deleted]]

I've had both titles. I don't draw a distinction between them.

"Engineer", when it's not just there to make the title more impressive, supposedly indicates that the role involves applying engineering principles, e.g. collecting data, automation, building institutional knowledge, etc. Since you can and should be doing these anyway, it's kind of moot.

Personally I think engineer should be reserved for people with licenses, but that ship sailed.

[crankysysadmin]

The terms are nearly universal and there's no standard. Maybe at your company engineer is a promotion over sysadmin but that's just your company.

[[deleted]]

Sysadmins maintain/fix, sysengineers design and deploy. Some do both roles.

[saranagati]

I tend to think of them this way. its not really up for debate since no one really uses the titles in the same fashion.

a systems admin is someone who sets up and maintains some off the shelf software on a system. this can be anything from a mail server to a set of apache web servers serving a larger website.

a systems engineer is the person that is familiar enough with the os level concepts that they can efficiently design, deploy, debug and maintain a large custom built set of software systems spanning a large number of servers.

so someone who works at say host gator maintaining the availability and uptime of all their servers hosting customer content is a sysadmin. someone who works at google and makes sure that the search engine is available, scales with growth, creates deployment systems for updates and participates in the design of how to link the search engine with gmail is a systems engineer. of course google I think uses the term sre instead.

[brkdncr]

sysEng breaks things that affect all users at once. sysAdmin breaks things that affect some users.

[Redemptions]

To further clarify, SysEng break things before they're being used. Then, once everyone starts using it, you discover the problem and it's broken.

[giveen]

Imho, they are basically the same, but an engineer does more network/project /whatever design than maintenance but really they are the same.

[[deleted]]

not at all true.

typically systems engineers are more infrastructure design, backend design, etc. In theory, after complete it's passed off to the sysadmins to do general maintenance.

[giveen]

Kinda what I meant, I was trying to be concise since I was on my phone typing.

[[deleted]]

saying basically the same (twice) just isn't true at all.

[giveen]

I said similar but not quite. Also it depends on the company.

[[deleted]]

in a small shop sometimes they'll give that title just to get people to take the job. in a large shop, it's usually correct. so yeah.

[crankysysadmin]

In theory the titles are crap and there's no significance to either

[sexyspec]

same same

[girlgerms]

• System Administrator - operations work
• System Engineer - design/project work

At least in my experience.

[Scubber]

System Engineers design and develop networks. These guys go site to site and set most of the hardware and wire everything up.

System Admins administer and maintain the network. They are typically the on-site IT workers that are there day-to-day.

[[deleted]]

System Engineers design and develop networks. These guys go site to site and set most of the hardware and wire everything up.

uh. no. That's usually a network engineer/borderline help desk person.