April 13, 2010 at 1:32 pm
Personally I would take option B from circumstances I have been through lately. Let me give you another scenario with Option A. Big company with big DBA team. At big company A it is likely at some point they could possibly start looking into outsourcing DBA support. My company decided to turn all server and DBA support to IBM in India and guess who was getting laid off. It hit me completely by suprise as I had always consider myself to be one of the go to guys in the company. It didnt matter though all the management was concerned with was now they had to cut X dollars from the IT budget to show benefit from the outsourcing. Fortunately things worked out for me but for a minute things were looking scary.
I would rather be at company B because I would have control of the environment and would be more likely to be relied on to make decisions regarding future directions and technology. In Option A it is very unlikely you will have much say so on future directions. Also, before the original company I worked for was purchased and merged into giant company, the working environment I was in was very much like a "family" environment. We all cared about each other, we did things outside of work, we all worked together to make things better and I was on first conversation basis with the top management in the company and was respected for my opinions when they needed direction. That kind of all went out the window when merged into the large corporation and alot of the important things I did went I felt went unnoticed and I never felt really appreciated for the long hours and weekends and the many projects I drove successfully. Also the amount of red tape and BS work tripled to get anything done.
So food for thought..
April 15, 2010 at 2:44 pm
If you find you get job offers relatively quickly (your skills match what a lot of companies look for), I'd say take a chance with the contract position, build up your experience even more. That way, should the contract actually end after 6 months and not be extended, you'll have no problem getting a new job.
If you do find out you may need to polish your skills a bit more to get those offere more easily in the future, you should still go for the contract position, but hedge your bets accordingly and start looking early before your contract expires for another contract position vs. a permanent position.
In the end, it is adventure and excitement vs. security and stability.
Good luck!
Gaby________________________________________________________________"In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not." - Albert Einstein
April 29, 2010 at 5:23 pm
As everyone has mentioned before, that is something you will have to feel out for yourself but I can give a little insight from my own personal experience.
As THE DBA for a small/medium sized company for the last 2 years I have learned vast amounts of things and felt gratifying in championing processes,project management and more! But the down side is I am attached to my Droid and the email I get on a 24/7 basis. My phone is my alarm and send me alerts when loads fail and the like. I have actually lost 2 girlfriends because of the time demands on my job (Though I can't really say Im complaining about this :-D) as I have put in some 60+ hour weeks, and needed to cancel dates to handle problems.
But all things considered, my personality tends towards a leadership role, and I enjoy championing processes and interacting with my user community on a daily basis. Though it would be nice every once in a while I could share some sort of brilliant piece of code with someone I work with...but everyone just stares at me with blank faces 😛
I think it would be nice working with a large group of DBA's to gain knowledge however. I'm pretty active in the SQL community, but sometimes it would be nice to have a physical presence with knowledge to bounce ideas off of. As a member of a few music bands, I can attest to the joy of creating something with a group of people 🙂
Link to my blog http://notyelf.com/
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