Now on the surface, that may seem OK. They had four flavors (so plain, I can't remember the specifics). Let us just say that the Senior Systems Engineer was below the Systems Engineer Supervisor.

These categories were aimed at encapsulating everything from the Help Desk to the Network Narcissist to the men and women who managed the servers to the IBM Mainframe Systems Programmer to some rather vague and esoteric positions which included something like strategic planning (which position was eliminated because no one really knew what he did and it wasn't much and they liked the sales guy who retired from it and were spoiled as a result and had to live with lowered expectations).

The real problem with "Systems Engineer", besides the fact that it could mean anything, is that sounded vaguely more like we were some how involved with railroads.

I suppose it served HR well, because with a title like that, nobody could leave to find another job.

And the bad thing about that is that far too many people were not really competent at whatever their "System Engineer" job was that week (people were moved around rather willy-nilly as interchangeable widgets).

As a humerous side note, there were two of us who were IBM Mainframe Systems Programmers. Every six months we had to sit on the help desk. My compadre was from India. I had to serve on rotation, but early on, my partner maintaining the system that ran Payroll / Personnel & Budget / Finance was dropped. I guess the managers feared that County employees might conclude the help desk was outsourced off shore. This was all made possible by the "one size fits all (but not really) title of "Systems Engineer".

What a fiasco.