Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

We give new titles to an old profession.

Back in the last decade of the prior century, I met several people at work who had one skill:

They could read a product catalog.

They would read the catalogs from DEC, Sun, IBM, and even Dell. They would proclaim, “Look what is out this year? We can buy one of these, one of those, duct tape them together and have a system.”

Soon thereafter, these catalog readers would proclaim themselves to be some kind of engineer because, by reading a catalog, they had designed and built a system. Wow.

Now in the second decade of the current century, we have a new generation of catalog readers. This is what

• systems engineers
• solution architects
• systems architects
• and others

They have read the product catalog end to end and then again. Except today we don’t have paper catalogs, we have websites and control consoles and such. The catalog publishers have changed: Google, Amazon AWS, Facebook, and even Apple and Microsoft.

As a user, I describe my needs, and the catalog readers point to the glossy pages in the catalog and tell me, “We’ll get one of these, one of those, and hold them together with duct tape, and …”

Cynical? maybe, but the resemblance to the 1990s is striking.