[Discuss] What is my work title?

[j.natowitz at rcn.com (Jerry Natowitz)]

My current position is described as "Engineer who wears many hats".  Not a title I would use on my resume.  A co-worker told that there is a very specific title for the work I do, but he can't remember it.

What I do, and have been doing for two companies since 2000, is to manage the computer systems and operating systems that are incorporated into large manufactured systems.

My first job involved working with Sun Microsystems and SunSoft.  I managed overlapping migrations from UltraSPARC II and IIi based systems to UltraSPARC III, Solaris 2.5.1 to Solaris 8, and from OpenBoot 2.X to 3.X.

Along with expected changes in software build procedures, software installation, and physical changes due to size differences, I also dealt with a number of systems issues:

1) We were experiences a much higher rate of UltraSPARC IIi failure than SMCC would believe.  After months of working with them, I discovered that they tested the CPUs in 64 bit mode, but we only ran 32 bit mode.

2) There was a PCI card developed in-house that would not work on systems using OpenBoot 3.X.  Turns out that I/O space for devices behind a bridge doesn't happen at boot time, but we were taking advantage of being the last card in the bus to help ourselves to memory.  OpenBoot 3.X packed the PCI space, preventing our trickery.  A redesigned card resulted.

3) Performance of certain floating point routines dropped by an order of magnitude on the UltraSPARC III.  SunSoft provided un released compilers and libraries to help, but ultimately I realized that 32 bit floating point arithmetic took a lot longer than 64 bit.  I re-wrote the routines to do 64 bit math on 32 bit operands and all was fine again.


My current job started out similarly, but the issues are different.  Migration from Solaris 2.5.1 to Solaris 8 and then to Solaris 10 and  dealing with serious USB bugs in the SunFire series.  Later on we migrated to GNU/Linux on x86.