Re: The demise of the Oracle professional?

I'd expect more of this to come. Oracle is a very competitive company and they know that one of the strongest pieces of ammunition that their competitors fire at them is the number of DBA's that it has tended to take to administer the Oracle system. Expect them to profess 'ease of use', 'self tuning', 'simple setup', etc. in the future. Also, I'd expect to soon hear the Oracle salesmen making claims like "Oracle doesn't require any expensive DBAs or folks special programming talent". And unfortunatly, quite a few folks in MIS management will believe them.

Roger Redford wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Often I wonder about the job market. In particular,
> the job market for people with my Oracle skill sets.
>
> When I started in the mid 90's, and client server
> was the technology of the day, it was not unusual
> to have a number of Oracle developers and a DBA
> in the coveted DBA position. All the developers knew
> both the GUI tool, and Oracle.
>
> Now, I am working in a big company. The IT department
> in my division experienced layoffs recently. Most all of
> the layoffs were Oracle people. But there were no
> layoffs of java people, or business analysts.
>
> In my unit, there was only myself and another. Now I have
> to do all his work too. He just found a job after about 6
> months of searching. He is working in a company that has
> 40 java developers, and only 4 database people! He is
> outnumbered 10 to 1.
>
> And I now work with 10 others, as the only dedicated
> Oracle expertise, so I am also outnumbered 10 to 1. I
> maintain 4 legacy systems that I didn't develop, and
> work on the development of 2 systems. And I am slated
> to also work on yet another big upcoming project as the
> only database expertise. There is a LOT of work to do.
> There is really too much work to do for one person, and
> still do a great job.
>
> The management does not want the other java people
> or analysts to learn Oracle. The analsyts are
> supposed to come up with something; I am supposed
> to then figure out how to implement it. So, systems are
> designed by beginners who do not develop in Oracle,
> or study database design. It's like they consider Oracle
> an extension of the operating system, that can
> be modified with their mouse.
>
> I remember the Novell CNEs. In 1995, these people
> were highly demanded. But now, they are lucky to
> be working, the market has been taken over by
> Microsoft networking.
>
> Since early 2000, I have been the only Oracle
> expertise in the entire organization. No more
> teams of Oracle people. Just me singlehandedly
> trying to keep it all working.
>
> The new 9i supposedly makes Oracle administration
> much easier, so I expect that there will be
> even less demand for a DBA.
>
> So, I wonder about the future as an Oracle
> professional.
>
> What is your experience? What is your ratio of
> Oracle expertise, to those with none? (By expertise,
> I mean someone who does use sqlplus, writes their
> own queries to the data dictionary, and writes a
> stored procedure or function at will.) Are you
> increasingly expected to do more and more work?
> Are backups never looked at, because you have
> too much development to do? Does management see
> no value in having any other tech people learn
> Oracle? Do you no longer have time to read or
> answer the newsgroups?
>
> Thanks a lot.
Received on Sat Jun 08 2002 - 19:28:09 CDT