Women in IT (Aug 3). Online freedom of speech (Aug 5th)

[Andrew Hammond]

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>        I agree on that. As IT globalises (read: outsources), those
> that are specialised have a hard time, because they're replaced in
> waves.

Outsourcing has turned out to be less cost-effective than originally
imagined. People who whine about having lost their job to India, in my
experience either were

1) code grinders or data entry technicians (assuming there's a difference)
2) working on boring crap anyway

> If you're a DBA, you're usually just a DBA. If you're good,
> anyway. Or coder. Those are pretty specific.

As a full time, professional DBA, I disagree. Hybridization is almost
required to be a good all-around DBA. You can't effectively design and
tune a database unless you have a pretty solid understanding of both the
platform it's sitting on (sysadmin) the storage it's using (sanadmin)
how it communicates with the application (netadmin) and what the
application is doing with it (developer).

While I'm not a specialist in any of the above areas, I'm at the very
least competent in all of them. I can't imagine doing my job effectively
without such a skill base. In fact, one of the reasons I moved away from
pure development is that I realized I needed to better understand the
operations perspective. One of the results is that when I do write code,
it is incredibly ops friendly and robust. Or, in business terms, valuable.

Drew




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