Re: Can DBA Jobs be Outsourced ???

Hi Ronnie, thanks for writing this:
> Hi,
>
> With all the hoopla going on about outsourcing and developing jobs
> being outsourced overseas I was wondering how will that effect DBA
> jobs in US.
>
> Unlike programming where the developer can do the coding anywhere in
> the world the DBA has to be present at the location to do the
> maintenance work.
>
> Will the DBA jobs ever be outsourced overseas and if yes then what are
> the options do we DBA's have to save our jobs.
>
> Thanks
> Ron
>

When I worked for the US federal government, we outsourced almost ALL jobs, including DBA and SysAdmin, keeping only enough civil service employees to monitor the contractors. I left the government because they were in the process of having us compete with contractors for our civil service jobs (and were penalizing us financially by inflating our salary costs ... the contractor's salaries were aggregated over a year, but ours were over the average years of civil service employment ... another story). Don't look now, but the US government (and maybe others) are being run by corporations with various profit motives.

Oracle tools make it quite easy to manage most database (DBA) things remotely. Also, in many cases the database servers are located off-site. Where I work now, our database servers are at a colocation site for security and manageability reasons. So technically, I'm not where my database is ... though I work for the company instead of being an outside contractor. If I want to mount a CD to install Oracle software, for example, I have to drive over to the colo site (not as far as India, mind you). In the government, the contractors received the Oracle CDs at their site, where the database servers also resided.

For good or ill, outsourcing is a way of life ... and not just in the IT field.

-- 
[:%s/Karsten Farrell/Oracle DBA/g]