August 17, 2010 at 12:44 pm
A mentor of mine once said that if you want to grow financially and technically in this industry you must move every three to four years. Otherwise, it is career suicide. Turns out he was right. Babysitting one company's systems for 10-15 years does not help you grow fast enough to keep up with the indutry in most cases.:-D
"Technology is a weird thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ...:-D"
August 17, 2010 at 12:48 pm
A mentor of mine once said that if you want to grow financially and technically in this industry you must move every three to four years. Otherwise, it is career suicide. Turns out he was right.
I don't know if I believe that.... I have doubled my income in X number of years at the same place and my knowledge base has grown substantially as new technology has come here as well. Our SQL Server farm has exploded and we are doing some of almost everything here now old, new, high availability, large dbs, disaster recovery failovers, etc.
August 17, 2010 at 12:53 pm
I don't know if I believe that.... I have doubled my income in X number of years at the same place and my knowledge base has grown substantially as new technology has come here as well. Our SQL Server farm has exploded and we are doing some of almost everything here now old, new, high availability, large dbs, disaster recovery failovers, etc.
I'm not saying there are not exceptions to this rule, but I am saying that the odds are you will get out of date (technically and financially) babysitting one system for years on end. This industry is just changing too fast. SQL Server 11 is due to be released next year! I know companies still running SQL Server 7 on certain databases out there! :w00t:
"Technology is a weird thing. It brings you great gifts with one hand, and it stabs you in the back with the other. ...:-D"
August 17, 2010 at 1:48 pm
TravisDBA (8/17/2010)
A mentor of mine once said that if you want to grow financially and technically in this industry you must move every three to four years.
I agree with this statement (in most cases). I've been with the same employer now for about 8 years. I got promoted after the first year and my title became IT Technical Analyst. I don't even know what the title means anymore. 7 years ago I was the sole IT person at a hospital that employed 350 employees, had about 100 computers, and 25 or so servers; I was responsible for everything. Now, I am primarily responsible for DB Admin, SQL Report Writing, and interface development. But my job title has not changed. Our HR department likes to use generic job descriptions, so my job description is the same as it is for three other application support people.
I think it's important to change employers periodically, not only for a raise, but also to grow in your area of expertise. This is something I've thought about a lot lately; being under another DBA that I can learn a lot from, working with another team that I can contribute to and also learn from. Everything I know is self taught, and the SQL Server Central daily newsletters is one of the excellent resources that I've come across to help me learn where I'm at. If I weren't going back to school and didn't have other career aspirations, I'd probably start looking around.
August 17, 2010 at 1:54 pm
TravisDBA (8/17/2010)
A mentor of mine once said that if you want to grow financially and technically in this industry you must move every three to four years.
Here's the standard answer Travis.....That depends.....
On your education, your age, your marital status, kids or not, and current state of happiness.
I almost burned myself out as an independent consultant (in an earlier life) trying to learn it all, traveling across the country to different contracts, working in CICS, McCormack and Dodge, mainframes, OS JCL, VB and Access, etc.
Life has a way of throwing curves at you and you have to be flexible. After the dust of Y2k settled, contracts for independents like me dried up like a grapes in the California sunshine. Married, 2 young ones, mortgage, car payments....you got to get back to work. Kinda like today.
So I found work locally, no travel, fair pay to cover basic needs, closed my consultancy and got reacquainted with my kids. I learned a lot of stuff as I was part of a massive conversion from mainframe processing to SQL servers for over 30 departments. Talk about a learning experience......I think throwing away an IBM 360 with all the associated tapes, cabling and tape and dasd devices was something I'll never forget. I don't think I would have experienced it if I had remained a consultant.
August 17, 2010 at 3:06 pm
I think work can be fun. Sometimes it means that the employees have to step it up, take some initiative and make it fun. I'm talking fun along the same lines as Steve mentioned as well as fun in the sense of having high morale and enjoying the workplace.
Jason...AKA CirqueDeSQLeil
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August 17, 2010 at 3:59 pm
When people ask me about my job, I tell them "I'm in over my head", which suits me just fine. I've been lucky enough over the last few years to know enough about the job to have landed it, but still have tons to learn. And, I've also been lucky enough to be engaged in a lot of areas of IT (help desk, sys admin and now dba). When I'm asked where I want to be in 5 years, I simply reply "smarter".
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