jjazwiecki

Based on my experience and conversations with friends, my impression is that companies with strong engineering cultures don't focus on time tracking, unless they're billing clients by the hour, in which case it makes sense.

However, I've never worked for a major, publicly-traded company. I assume they know what they're doing and are extremely buttoned up from an auditing perspective.

So, anyone who's worked for a major publicly-traded software company (and understands the capex/opex distinction), how do you track software capex?

Not that I'm looking to hire one, but when a non-technical company like Southwest has a meltdown, and they can't fix it on their own, who do they call? Is it big consultancies or are there little A-Team boutiques that drop in?

Broadly, I've seen two different families of engineering job titles in the wild.

What I think of as the "startup" or "high tech" family typically just has levels of engineer: junior, mid, senior, staff, and principle. Engineering seems to be more of a core function at these companies.

On the other hand, I think of the "pre-web" job description cluster, where software engineering gradually budded off of an IT department that managed printers and phones. There are usually a variety of types of role (analyst, developer, programmer, architect, administrator, etc).

Is there any good writing about these, and their relative advantages/uses? I'm biased against the pre-web cluster based on my experience but I'm interested in getting more input.