September 18, 2017 at 8:25 pm
Hi,
I have been working for a database consulting company for the last 3.5 years and I've been thinking about moving to the BI Dev side.
I am on call for many differents clients and although the calls are rare (still have to be ready though), I can have up to 3 weeks a month on call as well as other non official on call clients (Those who don't pay for 24/7 support but still require best effort). I don't get much compensation for that other than $100 extra a month. When on-call I do have to be able to reply and if needed, get working in 30 minutes or less. I have 4 different mailboxes for different clients. This obviously means I always have work in the back of my head as I do daily activities even though so far, I've never had to drop something I'm doing away from home to go and fix it.
Am I being "overused"?
Maybe this is because work (DBA) or just because of everything else I said but I feel like there hasn't been that many new projects that excite me. I do get to work with some cool things every once in a while. Other than that, I feel like I'm doing too much of the same ol' day to day activities. Because we're consultants, I can't just go around and bill my clients because I felt like improving their system because not all of them want to pay... Due to the low amount of dba at the company, I wasn't able to get myself removed from some of the rosters and therefor am "stuck".
I've been thinking about moving to BI Dev for a while now as my background before moving to a DBA position was .Net developer. The job I'm currently aiming at would be MSSQL with IBM Cognos and it's a fairly big company.
Is BI Dev good as a career? I assume that I may have to do overtime from time to time but unlikely to be on-call. Changing job/career path feels somewhat scary I have to say.
Thanks in advance for any advice you may have.
September 19, 2017 at 5:45 am
l_michel_l - Monday, September 18, 2017 8:25 PMHi,I have been working for a database consulting company for the last 3.5 years and I've been thinking about moving to the BI Dev side.
I am on call for many differents clients and although the calls are rare (still have to be ready though), I can have up to 3 weeks a month on call as well as other non official on call clients (Those who don't pay for 24/7 support but still require best effort). I don't get much compensation for that other than $100 extra a month. When on-call I do have to be able to reply and if needed, get working in 30 minutes or less. I have 4 different mailboxes for different clients. This obviously means I always have work in the back of my head as I do daily activities even though so far, I've never had to drop something I'm doing away from home to go and fix it.
Am I being "overused"?
Maybe this is because work (DBA) or just because of everything else I said but I feel like there hasn't been that many new projects that excite me. I do get to work with some cool things every once in a while. Other than that, I feel like I'm doing too much of the same ol' day to day activities. Because we're consultants, I can't just go around and bill my clients because I felt like improving their system because not all of them want to pay... Due to the low amount of dba at the company, I wasn't able to get myself removed from some of the rosters and therefor am "stuck".
I've been thinking about moving to BI Dev for a while now as my background before moving to a DBA position was .Net developer. The job I'm currently aiming at would be MSSQL with IBM Cognos and it's a fairly big company.
Is BI Dev good as a career? I assume that I may have to do overtime from time to time but unlikely to be on-call. Changing job/career path feels somewhat scary I have to say.
Thanks in advance for any advice you may have.
I suspect that nothing I am about to say will come as a surprise.
The extra $100 a month gives you an idea of how much (or little) value this company puts on your time outside of work. Spending so much of your time on call, for so little reward, is bad for your health and not so great for your bank balance, either.
I once had a job where I was on call one week in six, and for that week I was paid an extra 20% of my usual salary (still not enough though!)
But that does not mean that all DBA jobs are like that. And I can happily vouch for the fact that being a BI developer is a good career – that's what I've been for some years now and I am not planning my escape (other than retirement!) yet.
Perhaps you would find it easier to take a DBA/Developer role first, as part of the transition to full-blown developer? Just an idea.
Whatever you decide, don't be scared about moving on: your skills are in demand and your current company is not treating you right.
If you haven't even tried to resolve your issue, please don't expect the hard-working volunteers here to waste their time providing links to answers which you could easily have found yourself.
September 19, 2017 at 6:37 am
I really agree with Phil there. $100 extra per month for that is exploitation. Whether or not you decide to change careers, you should at least consider moving somewhere where your skills are valued (PAID) properly.
September 19, 2017 at 7:18 am
I can help give some insight into the whether or not moving into BI Dev is a good career or not.
I personally think the business intelligence and or data science area is good right now. Even jobs that may not be BI developers, but roles within the team responsible for supporting the entire BI ecosystem are good right now. Many organizations are trying to turn either their own OLTP data or siphoned API data from somewhere else into something usable and something valuable either for their internal teams or for their clients.
API's, Data modeling, data warehousing, ETL, NoSQL, machine learning, OLAP, real-time analytics, SQL development, and visualization are all hot topics right now. BI Developers kind of dance between all of these under that title or some other similar title depending on the organization.
Of those topics, machine learning and NoSQL seem to be the highest paid right now just because there is fewer talent. There are more BI developers who work within SQL Server for example than these so called, "Big Data Engineers" who work within the NoSQL realm that are likely doing similar things the BI developer is doing, but with different toolsets. While there are lots of new graduates in the machine learning area, finding solid experience talent in machine learning that can not only crunch and analyze data, but also speak to it.
From my end, I focus on being a architect and try to dance across all these areas at once and try to help other BI devs, data scientist and so forth bring it all together. It's been real fun working in BI than say, working on a major enterprise application. I really enjoy my work because of the complex data problems I face.
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