November 4, 2011 at 4:11 pm
I've worked as a summer school teacher, after-school tutor, janitor, teacher's assistant, and armored transport guard/driver. I got a job in IT as a data analyst, and I'm slowly taking on more and more database administration tasks, which led to me finding this great site. I'm basically the DBA's backup for when he goes on vacation.
November 4, 2011 at 5:04 pm
Good Lord. This is... going to sound a bit like a brag, but yeaaaahhhh...
(these are the non-computer ones)
- Janitor
- Stock Broker
- Costume Shop manager
- Warehouse picker
- 1 Hour Photo Developer and clerk
- Ice Cream Truck Driver (Mr. Softee)
- Land Appraisal Office Manager
- Data Entriest
- Administrative Assistant
- Event Setup Specialist (think the guys who set up tents/chairs/whatnot)
- Local Hauler (24' truck)
- Car Auction driver
- Demolition (not the explosive version)
- Framing and Roofing
- Survey Taker
- Meat packer
- Collections Agent
... Which is kinda scary considering I got into tech heavily about 11 years ago and I'm only 35. But I've worked since I was 13.
Never stop learning, even if it hurts. Ego bruises are practically mandatory as you learn unless you've never risked enough to make a mistake.
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November 4, 2011 at 5:13 pm
Evil Kraig F (11/4/2011)
Good Lord. This is... going to sound a bit like a brag, but yeaaaahhhh...(these are the non-computer ones)
- Janitor
- Stock Broker
- Costume Shop manager
- Warehouse picker
- 1 Hour Photo Developer and clerk
- Ice Cream Truck Driver (Mr. Softee)
- Land Appraisal Office Manager
- Data Entriest
- Administrative Assistant
- Event Setup Specialist (think the guys who set up tents/chairs/whatnot)
- Local Hauler (24' truck)
- Car Auction driver
- Demolition (not the explosive version)
- Framing and Roofing
- Survey Taker
- Meat packer
- Collections Agent
... Which is kinda scary considering I got into tech heavily about 11 years ago and I'm only 35. But I've worked since I was 13.
Wow, talk about multitasking. 😀
I'm a musician (guitar player and vocals) who played for a lot of local rock bands and was the main composer of our songs. We never recorded anything but we played a lot.
They say that those who play a musical instrument will have an easier time learning IT stuff. and vice-versa. Must be the same side of the brain or something.
Best regards,
Best regards,
Andre Guerreiro Neto
Database Analyst
http://www.softplan.com.br
MCITPx1/MCTSx2/MCSE/MCSA
November 6, 2011 at 6:49 pm
I've got a boring short list of activities from before I got caught up in doing things to databases, nothing like the broad spectrum displayed by Craig.
When I was young I took vacation jobs in a variety of things: in the first job I was a machinist (I've still got a scar from changing the band on a lenishing machine without waiting for it to stop - bad practice but faster, and when paid by output...); then I worked in a garden center, pruning things; then in QA in chip production (back in the days when the most complex chips were triodes; mostly I worked with diodes).
While I was at university I mostly worked during vacations as a payroll clerk (many times - I kept on going back to that one, it paid amazingly well and the permanent staff were nice people) but one summer I spent a few weeks in the south of France working at a horse farm (I was a good rider in those days - now it's so long since I've been on a horse that if I get on one I look like a sack of potatoes rather than a rider and the poor horse won't have a clue what I want it to do) which paid peanuts but was great fun. I was studying maths, without any idea of computing (although I did get into numeric methods, and algorithms for calculation with mechanical devices; and of course I'd used rotational mechanical calculators in high school).
I got placed as a temporary graduate assistant at RHEL (now part of RAL) for a couple of months after graduating from Oxford, and tried to program some analysis of cloud chamber data on their obsolescent Orion computer (no success, partly because I hadn't a clue how to program and had to learn the language on the fly, partly because the obsolescent hardware fell over on most attempts to read the mag tapes holding the cloud chamber data). Then back to (a different) university to do research on set theory and logic, act as an instructor (I think that's "teaching assistant" in the USA) for undergrad maths courses, and play with the university's computers (an IBM 1620 and an Eliot 503) when I had spare time not used for rock climbing, drinking, singing, or playing piano or clarinet.
Then into computing - working at the Nelson Research Laboratory mostly on computer languages and compiler technology, and a bit on engineering applications (my big achievement in those days was persuading management to scrap the attempt to provide a Deuce Alphacode compiler for the Marconi Myriad computer, although I had to waste quite a bit of my time on that rubbish before succeeding in killing it). In spare time (I didn't have much of that, because as well as my day job I was busy writing up my research so that I could submit a thesis) I tried music for gain (I would sing or play for a few hours in return for a meal, a lot of drink, and a room for the night - no money involved; discovered that I was good enough toi survive if I made a career of that instead or maths or computing, but not not good enought for it to be a prosperous survival, which is why I stayed in computing). When RAL was closed down (by Weinstock, a short-termist nitwit who controlled enough money to buy English Electric and thought that R&D was just overhead, to be abolished) I was offered jobs by Elliot Automation amd General Electric in sales/support (the said nitwit, who controled both of those as well as EE, understood that sales was a necessary function) and also (surprisingly, as the nitwit didn't control that) by ICL but decided instead to take an academic post at UEA.
At UEA I lectured (for research students in the sciences - the computing department in those days did no work at all with undergraduates) on programming, programmed various bits and pieces (molecular geometry, library stuff, data conversion stuff) needed by non-computing departments of the U, and researched information retrieval (which is where I first got interested in databases - this was a couple of years before Codd's first research paper on the relational model, so the databases were not at all relational).
Working at UEA was interesting, but academics don't get paid much, so I quit after a year and went back to industry, working on operating system design and writing the NAL language definition (which got implemented and fairly widely used) at CTL, then on data communications and small processor projects at ICL in Dalkeith (where we had the Ducal Palace as our offices and did all sorts of crazy things), then on mainframe data communications, interworking, and transaction processing at ICL in Kidsgrove with little database involvement, and then on 5th generation technology and massively parellel systems at ICL Manchester, which is what brought me back to databases - we wrote our own RDBMS (not SQL based)for the parallel system, then political pressure made us start to port Ingres onto the parallel system but we soon noticed that it had no chance of working without massive effort to parallelize it and switched to Oracle (with good cooperation from Oracle, so it did work once we had written a suitable lock manager for it). But databases were still only a small fraction of my work (I was responsible for all software achitecture and design 5G systems, one of my jobs was to specify the HOPE+ language, another to sort out what we would do with logic programming, another to evaluate the ECRC work on constraint programaming and outline what would need to be done to turn it into a product, another to determine the type system that the projects' platform software would use and to what extent it should be in hardware, another to handle liaison with the programming research group at Oxford University, and another to specify the programming reference model for fifth generation systems; and of course to liase with collaborators in Bull, in Siemens, in various Universities in UK, France, Germany, and Italy, to provide the technical content of annual reports to funding bodies and present progress reports at technical reviews by panels of ouside experts, and to mentor people training to become chartered engineers (I guess CEng here is roughly the same as PEng in the USA).
When ICL stopped doing serious software research projects I went off to Harlequin (the CEO there had been trying to acquire me for about 10 years, so that was an easy move) and worked mostly on what was essentially a raster image processing project for which we built an OODBMS, but the project was nowhere near complete when Harlequin folded a couple of years later; when Harlequin folded, I spent a while having a rest (Harlequin had been a bit strenuous - I was managing a small group of people split between Manchester, Edinburgh and Cambridge in the UK and Cambridge MA, Menlo Park CA, and Seattle in the US, and was expected to visit all those sites several times a year) and then got invited by a former colleague to apply for a job at Linkguard, which put me to some extent back into the databse game - my first task was to size the database for the proposed product, next task get the database work off the ground (to do that I had to get rid of DB2 and bring in MS SQLS); I probably wrote more C++ than SQL in my time there, but I managed RAID configuration and database configuration as well as running R&D and occasionally sweet-talking VCs.
Linkguard folded when the internet bubble burst; one of my colleagues from Linkguard went to Neos as Operations Director and he asked me to join him, take over the company's databases and the databases that it managed for its customers and sort them out - and at that point I was, for the first time in my life, in a job that was about databases and nothing else; it didn't last long - after a few days I was debugging javascript code written to interface with Cisco's BBSM software, a few weeks later I was tasked with getting our licensing position both for third partty stuff we were distributing to our customers and for stuff we were using internally sorted out commercially and legally, a couple of months after that I was head of research as well as owning all the databases, after another couple of months I had system authority over all hardware configurations proposed to customers, some time later head of R&D (with a team split between London and Chennai), a couple of years after that chief architect, deputy CEO, and technical director, - but in all those positions I retained ownership of all the databases; I handed them over to my successor as technical director (based in Beirut) when we completed the transition of Neos R&D from the UK to Lebanon and I left the company.
Since then I've been playing with databases, helping with the maintenance of some websites, getting some sun, and doing important things (learning castellano and galego, trying to get into old irish, singing, listening to music) instead of working. I'm not intending to work more than 16 weeks in any year, and not even that unless someone calls me with a really interesting project (unless all the "quantitative easing" so reduces the value of my income that I am forced to work).
So, apart from a few days in 2002, I've never been in a DBA job; DBAing is something I've done in my spare time in most jobs I've been in since about 2000. I was heavily involved in databases from about 15 years before that but not administering them, and in touch with databases but less heavily involved from the late 60s onwards.
Tom
November 7, 2011 at 7:07 am
I trained as a dentist for a while but I couldn't live hand to mouth like that.
I worked as a geologist but wasn't down to earth enough.
I spent one spring ploughing fields, but felt I was stuck in a rut.
I tried stand up comedy but everyone just laughed at me. Well I persevered, and they are not laughing now.
I had a holiday job leading potholing tours, but how low can a man sink?
I had a job on a wind farm, everything is a breeze after that.
I had a go at being a lift attendant, which had its ups and downs.
I've done brain surgery, I mean, its not rocket science.
So I switched to rocket science, but it didn't take a brain surgeon to see it wasn't going to take off.
So I started an origami school, but it folded after six months.
Making paper decorations, thats not all its cut out to be either.
I've been thinking of taking up confrontation therapy, but I don't want to get into that right now.
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November 7, 2011 at 9:00 am
george sibbald (11/7/2011)
I trained as a dentist for a while but I couldn't live hand to mouth like that....
*groan*
November 8, 2011 at 6:15 am
wow......tough audience
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November 8, 2011 at 2:13 pm
I think there is substance in the earlier post about musicians having an apptitude for IT and vice versa. Maybe the primary attribute is that to be good at either endeavor you can't be the type that is easily put off by detail. Fine musicians fuss over technique just like programers. Also, each field has its own mathematical basis and the results are often absolutes. Lastly, you reach a point in either case where the work just begins to make sense and you get that wonderful (and deeply needed) feeling of control.
November 8, 2011 at 2:20 pm
jshahan (11/8/2011)
I think there is substance in the earlier post about musicians having an apptitude for IT and vice versa. Maybe the primary attribute is that to be good at either endeavor you can't be the type that is easily put off by detail. Fine musicians fuss over technique just like programers. Also, each field has its own mathematical basis and the results are often absolutes. Lastly, you reach a point in either case where the work just begins to make sense and you get that wonderful (and deeply needed) feeling of control.
If there is a connection, I think it must be indirect. I am an absolute failure as any sort of musician. Can't keep a beat, can't carry a tune, can't sing, can't hold a note. Heck, even my heart doesn't keep a steady rhythm!
But I do seem to be able to DBA reasonably well.
I like where that leads! There are plenty of successful musicians with no talent, they just get by on sex appeal! Woohoo! That makes me ... :w00t:
(Logical stretches are my forte, at least when they amuse me!)
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November 8, 2011 at 2:43 pm
jshahan (11/8/2011)
Lastly, you reach a point in either case where the work just begins to make sense and you get that wonderful (and deeply needed) feeling of control.
Well put.
Best regards,
Best regards,
Andre Guerreiro Neto
Database Analyst
http://www.softplan.com.br
MCITPx1/MCTSx2/MCSE/MCSA
November 11, 2011 at 4:47 am
I've done a number of things since school
College years
McDonalds "crewmember"
Supermarket stacker
Computer store cashier
Circumstances caused me to leave college and do manual work
Warehouse line worker
Forklift driver
Completed MCSE Win2k
Network technician (jack of all trades job)
IT Technician
SQL DBA
SQL DBA Manager
Production DBA
November 11, 2011 at 5:36 am
Degree in Biochemistry but completely failed to get a related job after leaving university.
So after a couple of years doing odd jobs (driver's mate, pub chef, lab assistant, office clerk, accounting...) decided to see if my tinkering hobby in IT could become a career.
Then helpdesk -> SSRS developer -> DBA
November 14, 2011 at 9:09 am
MysteryJimbo (11/11/2011)
I...Circumstances caused me to leave college and do manual work
Warehouse line worker
Forklift driver
Did those help you study/work harder?
November 14, 2011 at 12:45 pm
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (11/14/2011)
MysteryJimbo (11/11/2011)
I...Circumstances caused me to leave college and do manual work
Warehouse line worker
Forklift driver
Did those help you study/work harder?
Id like to think so. I put myself through the MCSE myself and worked hard to try and get experience through whatever means necessary.
I also think I've progressed faster through my career than I would have done otherwise.
November 14, 2011 at 2:11 pm
- Lawn mower
- Shovel Snow
- Dishwasher
- Bus Boy
- Cook (so to say)
- Garbage man for big objects
- Rubber plant to make the rubber isolation for cars & trucks.
- Back to washing dishes
- Back to school (DB programming)
- Programmer (ERP Access + SQL 2000)
- Programmer (consultant with the school I was in)
- Programmer (VB6 + SQL Server 2005)
- Tech writer for RG (Wiki project that never took off)
- Programmer (ERP .Net + SQL 2005)
- DBA (BI SQL 2005)
- Programmer (SQL 2008 + Access Label printing application))
- DBA (Order web Site ASP. Net C# SQL 2008) + BI
- DBA (BI SQL 2005)
- SSC.com 20K + messages posted
Viewing 15 posts - 16 through 30 (of 40 total)
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