in reply to What is a Junior Perl Programmer?

I think this tends to be more representative of the complexity or, rather, the scope of the role.

A junior programmer, whether he be highly skilled or not, tends to interact mostly (if not always) with the members of the team to which he belongs.

A senior programmer would have a much broader scope in who he deals with because he is the one who is actually communicating with the customer or the end user(s) or other departments if in a large corporation. He's the one who takes a leadership role with his team members has to put up with all the political crap from everyone else.

Mick

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Re: Re: What is a Junior Perl Programmer?
by cadfael (Friar) on Nov 20, 2000 at 19:41 UTC
    Job titles are always a touchy thing. I have been at my present job for over 10 years, and my title has evolved over the years. The general outlines of my job have not changed much, however. I have always been a database administrator and unix system administrator doing work that has increased steadily in complexity.

    My title has not always reflected what I do because of some anal-retentiveness of Human Resources and the central IT department. HR didn't want to allow my supervisor to pay me much more than what I was getting, and IT wanted strict control over job titles. Finally I made a lateral move from Research Specialist to Scientific Programmer/Analyst and moved into the Senior Scientific Programmer/Analyst title aver a couple years. While this sounded high-falutin', it still did not reflect how I spent most of my time.

    Then about a year ago, HR finished a study of pay equity and title issues for IT job classifications, and decided that we would all change to titles that were pretty standard across the country (so they said), and that our pay scales would shift a little closer to similar types of workplaces in other places. Each title would have steps within it (entry, specialist, expert) which could be traversed without filing a whole new job classification form.

    The upshot is that all the various programmer/analyst titles were folded into one -- "Programmer/Analyst" -- with steps within the title for pay. An entry level PA could simply refer to oneself as a PA, thus shedding the stigma of being the lowest level.

    I was able to move into the Database Administrator title, get a pay raise, and have plenty of room to advance in pay. At our site, nearly all of us with new titles know and use Perl as an adjunct to our duties. (how's that for slipping back on topic?...)

    -----
    "Computeri non cogitant, ergo non sunt"

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