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Monday, January 29, 2007

Dept. Of Greener Grass

In a refreshing change from developers wanting to become DBAs Padraig O'Sullivan is a young man who doesn't want to become stereotyped as a DBA:
"I guess I am only 23 but I don't want to become labelled as a DBA and therefore someone who cant program or develop to save his life."


I think Padraig's attitude is sensible. As Robert A. Heinlein said, "Specialization is for insects." The trick is to find a boss who is happy to allow us to be generalists but pay us the wages of a specialist.

I have one piece of advice for Padraig: most managers looking for somebody to work in an IT role will plump for somebody who actually knows their own age over somebody who can only guess at it.
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6 comments:

  1. Anonymous29 January 2007 at 08:00:00 GMT-8

    Maybe Padraig should get a job in Oracle engineering :-)

    As for me, although my business card says 'Architecture Specialist', I consider myself a Generalist (know a little about lots) so I'm really confused.

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  2. Noons29 January 2007 at 16:12:00 GMT-8

    "DBA and therefore someone who cant program or develop to save his life"

    Hmmmmmpfh, Padraig needs a reality check! Most dbas do indeed have a coding background and still code a lot. Maybe he's been ill-advised on what dbas really do... ;-)

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  3. APC30 January 2007 at 02:23:00 GMT-8

    >> although my business card
    >> says 'Architecture Specialist'

    Does that mean I can tap you for free advice about my loft conversion?

    Cheers, APC

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  4. Anonymous30 January 2007 at 13:32:00 GMT-8

    I always figured that specialisation is knowing more about less.

    Personlly I try to be a generalist who specialises in troubleshooting application server issues, which is a generalism by design ;). Although I cry out to the world that I don't do any development anymore, I tend to find myself writing and debugging scripts every day.

    Being a DBA is not a job, it's a calling and I sure as hell like it. I'm far from being a guru (even though I might make it according to the burleson rules)

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  5. Padraig31 January 2007 at 08:38:00 GMT-8

    I never realized anyone actually read my postings! Sorry if I offended you noons, I understand a lot of DBAs come from development backgrounds and are more than capable of coding.

    The statement I made about DBAs not being able to develop was more what I believe a lot of people think of DBAs.

    Thanks for the advice on knowing (and not guessing) my age Andrew...I'll have to remember that one ;-)

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  6. Noons31 January 2007 at 16:24:00 GMT-8

    no offence taken, Padraig. If it had, I'd have left a note in your blog! :-)

    Yeah, the RSS feed aggregators put together a lot of blogs from everyone. I make it a daily task to review the OraNA aggegator, as much as I can within the free time available.

    There is always something interesting or useful there!

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