Andy,

Really enjoyed the article, I know how you feel, what with the full time job (110 mile commute every day), an 8 month old and trying to run a couple of sites in my 'spare' time.  Love to hear how your new role pans out, congratulations on the promotion.

Congrats Andy!

Having a Baby and a promotion WOW!  My daughter (see pic.) is now 3 1/2 and it is a HUGE change.  I wouldn't change it for the world.

Congrats again and Good Luck!

Nice article Andy and congrats. Nice to hear from you.

I personally I'm a developer and will stay that way, have done team leading, supervision and such, and was crap at it. Will not touch management with a barge pole now, and I make sure my boss(s) knows that.

Far away is close at hand in the images of elsewhere.

Anon.

Andy,

I, personally, have missed you but was warned about your new baby.  I don't even want to go there. 

The new forum software seems to be working but I kind of miss the old version.  I get weird messages like this when trying to vote on articles:

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers error '80040e14'

[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Line 1: Incorrect syntax near '='.

/include\voteArticle.inc, line 11

Also, when my recent article was posted, the READ counter wasn't working and one of the figures was missing.  Anyway, despite my whining, I know that you guys are stretched.  There really is no better SQL forum out there!

Hang in there!  It can only go uphill from here!

Great article Andy!  Congratulations!

I got a huge chuckle when I read:

"On March 30 our first child Tabitha Grace was born."

Combined with:

"I suspect it will be another month or two before things settle down."

A month or two?!  I suspect that your suspicions will need to be highly adjusted!  Enjoy, though!

I just had my 2nd child (first is 3 1/2) four weeks ago.  Time is soooo precious now, just like any sleep that you think you'll ever get!

It's wonderful!

-= Paul =-

Andy,

Congratulations on both the new baby and promotion.  After your fourth you'll understand busy. 

"Work expands to fill the time...", well it also contracts as well.  You find you will have the time to get done what is really important to you and that changes over time.

Great article and congratulations again.

Rob

I'm a little older, looking back at it all, and was struck by your concerns about leaving the development work behind and moving to management. A couple of thoughts: It's a different set of skills. You may be extremely good at it, and having managers who actually have been there is a good thing for the rest of us. It's usually more financially rewarding, has a longer reward cycle, has higher highs and lower lows. When you get to the point someday where  you long for the better control and better feeling of worth that comes from producing something you can see, rather than something that is nebulous, you can find your way back to development. I did that. I was not a poor manager either, but I got to the point where I wanted to stop playing the corporate games, stop sitting through endless meaningless meetings, writing reports that had to be oh-so-carefully worded.

So, press on, good luck. But come back back into the development pool when you can. The water's fine.

Hi Andy,

I'd like to read more articles about your feeling and experience regarding switching from a development position to a management role. As a DBA, I find there are more demands that I should play a multi-roles in my work such as business analyst (whether I can use data warehousing technology to address company's business needs), system analyst (how to integrate a bunch of tools around a core database), and developer.

Thanks,

Jeff

Congratulation on both the baby and the promo.  I am sure everything will be fine.  As far as leaving development I know the feeling.  I used to missed being development work.  I used to be the only development DBA working with 7 developers working for a start up .com company (24X7), now I am a production DBA and I take care of 20 or more DBAs and a lot more developers.  I don't spend time worrying about the data architecture as much as development DBA because my primary jobs switch to taking care of hot fixes, service packs, and managing backups jobs, DBCC Jobs and other job that I wrote to pull data from our many different server and push report to what we wanted to see and manage. 

I do work a little on development when development DBA ask me to help them solve something they couldn't solve, or support developers when they needed direction on how to approach and start their new application.

I have time to take care of my children when I needed.  I have 2 children (todlers) and they are just as demanding as babies. 

Good luck.

mom