First off, apologies in advance for the long rant, but this is from spending two years largely on the bench (albeit the last 9 months phasing out into something far more lucrative).

No insult at all to Steve/Craig, but the article quite honestly makes me feel sick. Back in the late 90's agents would FIGHT over us, we would have several gigs lined up a couple of weeks ahead of leaving our existing one. We had respect, authority, and back then, the "A" part in DBA really meant exactly that - WE were the authority, not the PM, not the Developer, and hell, often not even the client.

"Don't piss off the DBA!!" was the cry. We were on £550 a day and nobody DARED argue our rates.

Then things got tighter with the financial crash. The contracts dwindled to nearly zero. My last gig in September paid the princely sum of 2k, for 4 weeks work, which involved a pressure-cooker environment, a client whose morals were just a couple of notches above child-molestation, having to re-write 400 lines of code for the 10th "emergency" that week, last thing on a Friday night, when most of the management were in the pub.

Nowadays we get a dozen emails per week in our inboxes, dressed up as "Opportunities", telling us we need to plough through the latest 50page article that will keep us current with our competitors. Articles telling us, "Don't worry about going on vacation and being jobless 1 week later when they realise they don't need you". We get agents telling us, "Sorry, we had another candidate with 10 days more experience" or "He lives 10 minutes closer than you". "Sorry, the other guy has experience supporting the same suite of apps you do, but in addition he used to write Macros in Excel.

I've been asked for experience configuring Cisco Routers, for Christ's sake!

You don't see Lawyers, Doctors or even Teachers fighting for jobs. Back in the day you could tell a girl in a bar, "I'm in IT", and she'd coo and be all over you. Try finding another tech in a bar on a Friday night these days! A friend of mine teaches IT to 7-11 yr olds, and while being a Teacher was always an ardous task, he has not spent a single day unemployed these last 4 years. While I don't begrudge him his "success" (and in fact, I've given him many a shoulder to cry on during that time through a messy divorce), it's a bitter thing that I know 10x what he does, yet he has stayed paid and I haven't. What really annoys me is that the pimps who recruit us often earn more than we do, and don't get me started on management, especially PM's...

I'm lucky, I don't have a wife/kids, and although I don't want them, that's not the point. It's every man's absolute RIGHT to be able to provide for a family, and there's no damn way I could have provided for one after 2007.

Yes, I'm aware of the financial crunch, doh. Yes, I'm aware that many of the repetitive DB tasks have been (foreseeably) offshored to countries where techs live with their parents in houses that cost less than my car until they die (usually the parents I mean, but with our profession that's certainly no given). But ours is a profession that requires us to study MORE than Doctors, and we shouldn't be made to feel like the fools we are for making a quarter of what they do.

Personally I'm getting the hell out of it all. I'm sick of T-SQL, sick of SQL Server, sick of DB management, and sick of IT, at least, what it has morphed into these last 3-4 years. Lest I be accused of being bleak, things are looking better than ever, I just got back from 10 days on the Caribbean, I was buyin OTHER people Bellini's again, the smile is well and truly back on my face at last, but that's NO damn thanks to IT.

😛