Re: Oracle DBA Profession hard?

-----Original Message-----
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L <ORACLE-L_at_fatcity.com> Date: Wednesday, January 08, 2003 3:13 PM

>I'm curious. Does everyone here think the IT profession is hard? Does
>everyone think that being a DBA is harder than say, a teacher, or a sales
>clerk, or something else?
>
>I don't understand the attitude. Or maybe I'm just lucky. The IT field is
>wide-open for everyobe to find a niche where they are comfortable.
>
>And it is certainly a better field than nursing (hours, pay and exposure to
>multyitude of diseases suck!), teaching (while working with most kids would
>be fun, the pay is tough and the hard-luck kids are tougher), retail (wanna
>work in Home-Depot?).

Moving the whole "ORAWOMAN" issue back "On Topic" and specifically with respect to what Thomas Mercadante brought up, I just couldn't resist answering this question he posed.

I was an Electrical Engineer for about 7 years out of school. But you know, in the following 23 years I've been in the IT field, (10 years IBM mainframe technical support, then 4 years Software/AG Adabas DBA, finally the last 6 years adding Oracle DBA to the mix), I've come to absolutely love dealing with the hardware, operating system, and database technical issues that make up the IT profession from my perspective.

HOWEVER, there are a number of the people-related unpleasantries that sometimes make the whole thing unbearable.....

For instance - The IT profession seems to have far more than its share of people who:

• Leap out of their seats whenever there is a problem, doing everything in their power to divert blame and resposibility to somebody else or something else - "the system", "the database", "the network", and those whose responsibility it is to take care of those things. It's never THEIR system, their program, their logic, their procedures at fault.
• Display a total lack of patience, wanting everything and wanting it done NOW.
• Display an arrogance that would rival il Duce (Mussolini).
• Strut around like they are some clever genius because they know a few commands from some manual that make a machine do something. (By the way, they like to hide the manual so nobody else can find out what they know.)
• Come up with stupid ideas that make no sense for the environment because they read some blurb in a technical journal.
• Use the jargon from those journals in such an inane manner while really displaying their total ignorance to those who know what the terms mean.
• I could go on and on, but for brevity sake we'll leave it at that. I'm sure you get the picture.

And it's these (above) kinds of people who seem to have the time to politic and ingratiate themselves with higher powers and thus end up in the management slots, making technical people's lives miserable.

So from my perspective, what could be just one of the most wonderfully logical, organized, rewarding, creative and satifsying professions is more often than not, turned into a stressful nightmare. Who knows, maybe ANY profession can become that way - even being a florist or raising puppies.

As for me, I am looking to start backing out of this whole scene and get back into something where the above negatives can be minimized, at least for a while.

Jim D.
Present Adabas and Oracle DBA - Future something else.

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Author: James Damiano
  INET: jadam_at_nhes.state.nh.us

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