Re: The demise of the Oracle professional?

I think that we are talking about different levels of knowledge here.

I've had managers who:
- asked where are these views? Thinking that they were executable files on a network drive. - asked what is the order that the rows are stored in Oracle? As in Cobol.
- thought they were a designer, and came up with their own very bad designs.
- allowed tables to be designed without primary keys. This caused pathetic performance.
- thought that their people were SOOO good, when they were just beginners. This is often based on how much they like them.
- gets analysts to: do no analysis, and still write specs. - thought that to create a few tables and stored procedures, you had to reboot the whole unix server. - did not know that a commit obliterated a savepoint. - did not know the difference between hot and cold backups.
- thought that the only way to speed up performance, was to just add more and more hardware, not tune the SQL statements. By the time I got there and figured it all out, this had led to more bad decisions and cost millions!

So, with this lack of knowledge, it is impossible to determine what is correct and what it not. Are your people working well or not? Do you give them a bonus or fire them? How many people do you need for this project? How do you give them direction when you don't know what is involved? Do you let them guess and do trial and error, or insist that they do more analysis? How do you make decisions on a backup strategy, architecture, etc.? What is the most critical part of the project? How much time do you realistically allocate for a project without guessing? How do you ensure that things run smoothly, instead of having one emergency after another?

Think of Dilbert's pointy haired boss. My experience is that it is really frustrating to work with a boss that does not know what it going on. You spend more time trying to educate them about the basics, than talking about the issues to get a decision.

True. With the new complexities of tech, it is impossible to know everything. I can't know everything about java either. So, it would be impossible for one manager to have all the certifications from CISCO, OCP, MSCE, etc.

In which case, the way to manage all the different technology specialists, is like a CEO. The CEO does not know everything about accounting, engineering, sales, procuction lines, legal, HR. So, those are delegated to specialists in these areas. What then becomes important are the people skills to referee all these groups. But the CEO must still have a fair knowledge about these areas.

Thanks for reading.

"Niall Litchfield" <n-litchfield_at_audit-commission.gov.uk> wrote in message news:<3d08902d$0$8505$ed9e5944_at_reading.news.pipex.net>...
> Roger apparently wrote
> > > My feeling on IT management is that you MUST have three things:
> > >
> > > 1)
> > > Technical skill!!!!! Absolutely. Not debatable. How can you
> > > manage that which you don't understand? Could a generalist manager
> > > put up a nuclear power plant? No. You must understand what's
> > > involved.
>
> Do I agree that you have to understand what you manage. Yes, absolutely.
> Does that mean technical skill in the sense of say CISCO qualifications or
> In depth Oracle knowledge. I think the answer is probably not. ISTM that a
> broad understanding of what IT is and can do, and most especially the
> business strategy and processes of your organisation is key. In depth
> knowledge shouldn't be required, an ability to distinguish between BS and
> reasoned argument is. Apart from anything else technical skills do go out of
> date rapidly and when not being used on a regular basis.
>
>
> --
> Niall Litchfield
> Oracle DBA
> Audit Commission UK
> *****************************************
> Please include version and platform
> and SQL where applicable
> It makes life easier and increases the
> likelihood of a good answer
>
> ******************************************
Received on Sat Jun 15 2002 - 12:43:12 CDT