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Valued Member
 
Group: General Forum Members
Last Login: Wednesday, September 02, 2009 9:58 AM
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I started out with a BS in Biochemsitry with an intent to go to medical school. I liked the chemistry end of it more than the bio end, so I changed my mind from persuing and MD to a PhD. After 2 and a half years of not seeing eye-to-eye with my advisor, he kindly asked me to not come back for the spring semester, so I took my MA and left school with no idea what I wanted to do, other than never set foot in a chemical lab again. I took the first job that came along, which was doing inventory and infomation management for a chemical distributor. That turned out to be a horrible place to work, so after a few years there, I foresook the science world and am now a DBA for a non-profit social services agency. Actually, I'm not even really a DBA, though that's my title. I'm more a business intelligence developer, but whatever.
I don't think it's NECESSARY to have a degree in order to have this career, though I would very much like some formal eduction in the CS field. I've always been really good with computers, numbers, and logic puzzles, which is what it all really is when you break it down. I'm just not sure where to start or what the best learning method would be.
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Forum Newbie
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Last Login: Friday, December 04, 2009 7:39 AM
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I see a lot of posts decrying the need for a degree of any sort and specifically an IT-related degree. In just the last 10 years I have seen a big shift in focus by employers, and from what I can tell those that don't see the need for the degree have been in the field longer than that (as I have).
The way I see it, 10-20 years ago a rather large percentage of people stumbled into IT fields such as DBA. There really weren't degrees available that addressed IT outside of computer science. Now, people are making conscious decisions to go into various IT fields as a career. I see a degree as an important part of that career decision. Most of those who have been in the field for many years have the experience to take the place of the degree. For those getting degrees, their practical experience needs to start during college or very soon thereafter. As other posters have mentioned, an IT degree has a limited shelf-life for practical knowledge, so it must be put to use in short order for it to be worth anything.
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SSCommitted
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Last Login: 2 days ago @ 6:51 AM
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BA English
DB certification program about 10 years ago.
My route to DBA was via encyclopedia publishing, where I learned about databases while managing the editing stages of the writing. I never did figure out the book-author many-to-many puzzle before learning about normalization, though. 
I got some entry-level reporting jobs with my initial DB training (career change due to lack of prospects in publishing), then did web development for several years, then applied for DBA when I saw that I was doing a lot of the DB work anyway.
I don't think an IT degree is an automatic prerequisite for a DBA job, but I don't see how it would hurt if a person was able to do well in an IT degree program that provided relevant education (normalization, working with a real product such as SQL or Oracle, performance, recovery, and testing topics, etc.). And even if it didn't, I bet it gets a person in the door to have such a degree. Though I also bet most people with the typical CS degree paths steered toward Java or C first and then moved to DBs later.
But the DBA position, even more than other IT positions, seems to lend itself to a person who doesn't have a formal IT education. A motivated person who is willing to learn the hard but necessary parts of DB theory (I'm still learning...) and the quirks of SQL Server and SQL (I'm still learning...) - but who also is well organized (I'm still learning... ) - can do well. It seems to me that a lot of DBA issues are less technological than policy and personality related. The hard part is that when the issue is tech related, it is usually very technical or fraught with tradeoffs. That and the fact that almost everything involves data both lead to a very busy job.
Thanks for the question. I think it is a good one, even if having a degree doesn't hold equal importance for everyone.
- webrunner
Microsoft Certified Technical Specialist
(SQL Server 2005)
How to Post Performance Problems
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SSChasing Mays
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Last Login: Yesterday @ 7:18 AM
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| I have a degree in Physics, but haven't used it since graduating. I wanted to go into research but was horribly disillusioned by my advisor. My first job was in marketing/merchandising and after several years in related jobs I made a career change and took some VB classes. I got a programming job (in a different language) and eventually became a DBA. My degree did help in getting my foot in the IT door (at least that's what my first hiring manager told me). Hard work and willingness to learn new things has got me where I am today...wherever that may be.
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Forum Newbie
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Last Login: Tuesday, July 07, 2009 8:23 AM
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My degree is a BA in Child Psych/Social Work-use it in every meeting I attend. I was hired in a non-it job and after 3 years bid into a business analyst position. When a TEMPORARY team was formed as a detail to create THE DATABASE, I was assigned by my boss to the 6 month detail. That was June 1980 and I never looked back. I have been the chief of database administration for 7 years.
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SSC Veteran
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Last Login: Yesterday @ 9:21 AM
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I had one Fortran course as an undergrad and one PL/I in grad school. I got a Ph.D. in Math and taught at university for 10 years, first math, then I started taking CS classes and ended up teaching CS. But -- publish or perish -- I perished  So I was hired by the IT department of a medical school to do mainframe software development, based on my CS teaching experience. 20 years later I'm a mainframe and a C# developer in the same shop. Here the developers do all database design and implementation for home grown applications. I'm not a DBA, the DBAs manage the databases for PeopleSoft and other purchased applications.
This place requires a bachelor's degree of all IT employees. Either the degree is in an IT or science field or 3 years relevant work experience is required.
Terri
To speak algebraically, Mr. M. is execrable, but Mr. C. is
(x+1)-ecrable.
Edgar Allan Poe
[Discussing fellow writers Cornelius Mathews and William Ellery Channing.]
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SSC-Enthusiastic
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Last Login: Friday, January 08, 2010 1:26 PM
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I'm a developer/architect rather than a DBA but my bachelors and masters are both in geology & geochemistry. (I had been working toward a CS minor in college, but ran out of money and needed to graduate before I finished it). I worked as a petroleum geologist for a couple years before switching to IT because my ex got transferred during a slump in the oil industry. While I have to admit the ideal career would be working with geological software, I haven't really regretted my switch.
I don't think a CS or IT degree is necessary at all. I don't think it hurts, but much of what people learn in university programs is more theoretical than business oriented anyway. You often find courses in the more cutting edge technologies in the community colleges years before they show up in the universities (or at least that was the way it was about 10 years ago when I was considering going back to school to get an IT degree... I was able to find all the courses I needed at the local JC and the university curricula didn't even have them anyway.)
--
Anye Mercy
"Service Unavailable is not an Error" -- John, ENOM support
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." -- Inigo Montoya in "Princess Bride"
"Civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice." -- Will Durant
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Forum Newbie
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Last Login: Tuesday, December 15, 2009 9:10 AM
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For degrees, I have a BA in Comparative Litrerature and a BS in Civil Engineering, and we won't go into the minors to fill the gaps. I got into computers back in the TRS-80/Apple IIe days, and have kept current to stay employed. Though I'm currently doing a bit of DBA work, I'm doing more business analysis now that my former job, where I was the DBA, software developer, legacy support, sysadmin and telco for locations in two countries. I honestly don't think the degrees matter when it comes to being a DBA, it'smore about being able to look at a problem, come up with a solution, and build a backup in case it doesn't work the way the bosses want.
I think Powell put it best, "I'm fairly well read, but at the same time I'm not an academic. I'm a practitioner, somebody who was raised to see a problem, analyze it, have views about it, and have passion for a solution."
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SSC-Enthusiastic
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Last Login: Monday, March 01, 2010 1:51 AM
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Thats really true
its not just a matter of having A DEGREE but its matter of your way of utilizing you abilities in the sensiful manner .
Even in a long journey of my life i have collected many degress
and got lot of experiences in different fields also and i realize that the knowlede can never be dependent upon the degress what u have its only depend upon the right use of you tallent/
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SSC-Enthusiastic
Group: General Forum Members
Last Login: Saturday, December 12, 2009 1:02 AM
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I love this issue.
I studied International Marketing with German, when this was new in Europe After a couple of years in export sales/marketing , I realised I didn't want to wait for dead man's shoes to get ahead and took a 4 month course in computer programming, which many wanted to do, but few could pass the aptitude tests. I learnt flowcharting, Cobol, IBM and ICL Assembler and how to use a punch machine. In my first job after graduation, I had to learn BASIC and never used punched cards again. My business background helped enormously in the early years. I progressed from trainee programmer, to Projects Manager in 4 years and quadrupled my salary.
I worked in small teams on minicomputers, where everyone needed a wide set of skills, so I did design, programming, testing, implementation, user training, systems management etc. I spent nearly 6 years with Digital (now HP) developing and installing applications all over Europe, in the US, even in Australia.
At the end of my DEC career, I took a 5 day course and did some programming with their relational database product (VAX Rdb). I left DEC in 1986 and became a freelance Rdb DBA. I was doing that for 21 years, but last year I switched to Sqlserver.
In the early days, I met a few people with CS degrees. CS study at the time was very scientifically oriented, so graduates came into commercial IT with the expectation that they would advance rapidly, but tended to get frustrated and bored quickly, because they were used to programming in memory and not dealing with disk files. I would therefore say that then a CS degree was a disadvantage in commercial IT.
I definitely found my business background was a big help in IT, because I could talk to business people in their own language and was able to use my IT skills to make their business processes easier to operate. I designed accounting systems (Credit is nearest the window ).
Business is essentially about processing and manipulating data, so I became less interested in hardware / software and more interested in data management and manipulation. From there becoming a DBA was the logical option, although nobody called me a DBA until 3 years after I started.
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