After being at work for a few hours, I noticed that my treasured Wordpress sticker was missing from its usual spot on my whiteboard between "IRC girls are evil" and "Protected by the Bill of Rights."  I’m afraid that one of the hippy treehuggers from the office stole it out of spite believing it was a George "W" Bush sticker.  I’ve got a whole stack of other ones to replace it with, but still!

So a couple of weeks ago, I walked into the office and my boss tails me to my desk.  He says, "I’ve got good news and bad news."  Craving to be left with something to complain about for the rest of the day (Thursdays are boring), I take the good news first.

"You’ve been promoted to Senior Application Engineer."

Well that was unexpected…but quite good news indeed.  The bad news was that I was only getting a pat-on-the-head raise, but that can be dealt with later.  Overall, I was impressed.

So imagine my surprise this morning when the boss starts doling out paperwork to the team that we are all now "Network Engineers."  Ok, still Senior Network Engineer, but..wtf, mate?  I have a hard enough time explaining that for historic reasons, a CAH Application Engineer has nothing to do with writing code.  (I implement Neat Third Party Stuff into our medication dispensing and infusion products.)  The rationale isn’t clear, but at least it’s plausible.  But making the jump to Network Engineer is such a misnomer that it knocks off a valuable chunk of professional credibility right off the bat.  Not that I’m looking for a new job any time soon, but explaining this 5 or 6 times at Lunch 2.0 every month would get old fast.

Calling myself a network engineer is about as accurate as calling the HR group who championed this initiative a team of janitors.  The only "networking" I do is the social kind.  I don’t know if I have any real input into HR’s R&D roadmapping, but I’m at least going to bring up my concerns at our group lunch tomorrow.  And if all else fails, I’ll just tell everyone I’m making twitter for nurses.

The Interface Services team is being disbanded.

Some members have been offered positions in Systems Engineering, some are going to Release Engineering, and the boss wants to take me and a few others with him to an Operations team that handles remote access, monitoring, and other one off projects that are supposed to generally make life easier for our field engineers.

This is really sudden news, but I have to admit I’ve always had an eye on that team because of how disorganized they’ve been, and have strangely felt like I could do some good there. Boss feels the same way, but isn’t sure how he wants to handle this situation yet. Regardless, I told him I’ve a vested interest in moving wherever he does.

Huh.

EDIT: The group I may transition to would be taking in those existing operations projects, as well as others. The group’s working title is “Solutions Engineering.” And it will only be created if Mark takes it.