Difference between System Administrator and Production Support Engineer?

I am trying to create a job posting for a role we are trying to fill and I am unsure if I should post it as a System Administrator or a Production Support Engineer. What is the difference?

Is Production Support Engineer a lot like a senior version of System Administrator?

Our job actually IS production support, meaning that we need someone to support the production system and own it's availability. When I look online I don't see too many roles named that way.

Solution 1:

Titles are just titles.

From what I have seen they are not really standardized, so you want to go with what sounds like what people will be doing. I personally don't like the title Engineer in CS, but that is always debatable. My recommendation would be to go with "System Administrator."

The nice thing about a vanilla "Systems Administrator" title is that it is vague, and people will look at the actual job description and not be scared of by "Engineer" (Do I need advanced math skills required to build a bridge?) or "Support" (Am I just fixing outlook for people?). Also, it is probably a job title people will be searching for.

If this is a website, you might want to put "Web Operations" in there. Either way, I would focus on the job description to make sure it describes what the job actually entails.

Solution 2:

I've had both of these titles at numerous different jobs. These titles aren't standardized in many organizations, and the the actual job description can be very different from one organization to another.

Here's what I've discovered, especially with respect to the opinions in upper management. I'm sure other people will have different opinions. Those of us working in the trenches understand that "titles are just titles". But outside our world, people (Users and managers) often don't understand what we do, and this 3-or-4-word job title provides a quick summary of our world. Words, like first impressions, do matter.

• The perception is that an "Engineer" designs and builds things, like a "Software Engineer" or an "Electrical Engineer". Sometimes this gets silly, like "Sanitation Engineer" (Janitor? Garbage collector?). An "Administrator" simply runs the things which were built by other people. "Engineers" tend to have higher status then "Administrators".

  • An "Operator" is even further down the respect scale. That said, things like Nagios, Munin and Zenoss have alot to do with "site operations".

  • I'm not sure what to think about titles like "System Analyst". Many organizations use an external title like "System Administrator", but use a title like "System Analyst III" on the internal salary scale. Some of these people are really sysadmins, while other "System Analysts" sit at a desk and produce reports. Other "Analysts" advise the CEO directly, over cocktails, and are very, very well paid. I've had an internal job title of "System Analysis" for 6 years at 3 different companies, but my "real" job has always been something like "System Administrator" or "Release Engineer". Ironically, now that I'm a "Computer System Engineer III" at a large research organization, I'm being asked to write papers.

• I find that "Production System Engineer" tends to carry much more respect then a title like "System Administrator", especially with upper management. Everyone knows that "Production Systems" are "important", therefore it's important to know who carries the responsibility the "Production Systems". But that "System Administrator" person? We're not really sure what he does.

• "System Administrator" is a fairly generic title. It could mean many things within an organization. A "System Administrator" might be responsible for the maintaining the Windows Desktops, or maybe they do network administration because the organization didn't fire a full-time network administrator, or maybe they run the all internal Email/Active Directory services, or maybe they (or their team) run the $200 Million production website. Or maybe it's "all of the above".

Solution 3:

Whenever I see someone with "Administrator" in the title, I think of someone who gets to set day to day policy at some level (even if it's just the level of the systems they are responsible for).

Whenever I see someone with "Support" in the title, I think of someone who isn't involved in the process until something has already gone wrong. Relative to a system administrator, this could be either low-level tier 1 support (servants of a system administrator) that responds to user requests, or high-level consulting support that's called in when the system administrator himself runs into trouble.