At my day job, my title has changed three times. It’s hard to believe, but I started as an SRE III. A year in, I got a pay bump and a new title: Principal SRE. Recently, they merged four teams, and now I’m a Sr. Cloud Engineer 1 (E4).
They’re trying to align our titles with the software engineering folks. It’s confusing, and the pay scale doesn’t make much sense because they try to map it to SWE pay. [ITS NOT THE SAME]
I’m part of the infrastructure engineering team. Most of us have backgrounds in systems, networking, and security. Out of 40 people, only one or two come from software engineering. Can we write software? Yes, but it’s not our primary focus. Our sole purpose is to uphold, build, maintain & secure the infrastructure.
My team works incredibly hard, yet we often go unnoticed. Even our managers, directors, and VPs recognize that we don’t get the credit we deserve. It’s baffling to me. In other large companies, there’s typically one distributed engineer for every four to six software engineers. We have one engineer for every 12-13 software engineers. It feels unbalanced.
So, I’ve stopped caring about titles. Mainly because it feels pointless. If our efforts go unnoticed, why should our titles matter?
I love my work and the people I work with. I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Can I make more elsewhere? Yes. But I don’t see a reason to leave if my team is appreciated enough. But it’s disheartening to see my coworkers constantly underappreciated. I don’t need any personal recognition—I know the value of my work. But this constant game of title changes and superficial appreciation needs to stop. I’m ready for a change in how we are valued. Be the change, you want to see.