Typical Senior Engineer Position?

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Hey all. So, after working in a NOC for almost ten years (military and civilian), I was fortunate enough to find a senior network engineer position on a different government contract. Same networks as befoe, but now I'm on the engineering side of the house with a 20 percent pay increase. While I do like the engineering role because it's much more of a challenge, I find myself asking if this job is really what senior engineers do. For example, I'm assigned projects (major upgrades, recaps, etc.) and am responsible for keeping the project schedule, procurement, and the overall management and direction of the project. However, I do no configuration, no IP space assignment, or any actual tech work because our test lab engineers configure the gear before it ships to site. So I figure in this environment, I'm much more a PM than an engineer.

Question...Is this a typical senior engineer role? I get discouraged sometimes because I've worked hard to get the certs and hands on experience, only to not use any of it. Further, half the time I feel like I'm babysitting our lab engineers when I have to explain to them how VLANs work or how the IP scheme is supposed to be for the various projects.

Comments welcome, lol.

ChooseLife

Are you complaining about skipping a step on the career ladder and breaking into the next one too early?

PM is typically considered a "higher up" position, so whether it is a good progress depends on your motivation and overall career goals. If you want to be a manager and advance through the ranks, it's definitely a good move. If you want to become a non-managing technical expert, you may want to get more involved with hands-on - but even then this PM experience should be very valuable in the future.

ColbyG

No, it sounds like what you're doing is either a sort of management position, or even an architect-level at some shops. Senior engineers will typically still do plenty of configuration.

Mrock4

I do a lot of work like you do as the lead engineer, but in addition to that, I am doing a large amount of configuring as well for those projects (infact, I'd say I do the majority, but whatever I can't do, I task out to my other engineers). It does sound like you're doing a lot of project management as opposed to engineering, which sucks. On the bright side, those are some valuable skills to have. My predecessor lost his position because he was a brilliant engineer with no project management skills at all (so every project came in late).