I’m often asked, “What’s your job?” The short answer is that I fix things for AT&T. The longer answer is:

I’m like a prosecuting attorney and a judge, for complex computer systems.

For complex IT systems, involving load balancers, web servers, application servers, inter-application communication via sockets/web services/message queues, databases, SANs, proxy servers, security appliances:

• When everyone says, “My piece is good. Somebody else is broken.”
• I ensure that we collect evidence.
• I look at the evidence.
• I say, “The evidence shows that your piece is doing this and it should be doing that. Fix it.”