Jake Shelton (5/26/2011)
Hi Craig, glad you replied and I was pleasantly surprised you were around to do so as quickly as you did.
I cheated. I get notifications when this thread is responded to, along with the ones in my other articles. 🙂
Phoenix? The one in the US I presume? 🙂
I ask (partly because I'm poking fun at your very american presumption I'd know what nation Phoenix is in!!) partly because your economy varies from state to state, even county to county, let alone from ours.
Yep. PHX, AZ, USA. I do make that assumption though. When your fat butts take up half a continent, you forget others don't. 😉
IT has been in utterly dire straits here in the UK since '07, and although in the last few weeks there is a recruiting upswing in progress at the uppermost levels of the Investment Banking sector, you still need skillsets longer than my schlong to benefit from it.
Ah, a shame. I hadn't heard much about that but then I don't track the foreign IT markets. You're quite right that our economy has almost its own ecosystem, and it does vary widely.
Doctors, Actuaries etc commonly make six figure salaries here in the UK (GBP), but barely 5% of DBA's do, yet we must study a lot more on an ongoing basis (and that is a cost not merely in materials but mostly time).
Same here, actually. Actuaries are CPAs to us. However, having a family member who's a CPA, another brother in trial law, a buddy in defense law, and a few doctors in training still trying to finish up... one of them owes me mightily on beers, by the way, the cheap student he is... We don't have anywhere NEAR the volume of enforced training they do. You know what you need to do to get a job (not keep, just get) as a DBA? Show up and con the interviewer. If you pull off the job, to keep doing your job you need to do... absolutely nada. There's no official boards. No certs. No malpractice suits. If your company is happy with you sailing along with 20 year old tech... you're good to go.
My brother spends 10k+/year to keep his licenses current, because of mandatory training. That's not new things, that's showing that he remembers what he says he does. CPAs have 2 (or 4, if it's important I'll go find out for sure) cycles where they have to go through the motions with the government to keep their status. I know some of that is paid coursework, most if it is keeping up with new tax laws and changes. I can still write SELECT * FROM table without caring what a cross apply is. If they don't know that I have to pay a new economic charge for not having my water hooked to my solar panels and I still deduct, we're both in for a world of crap.
We're not gods. We're workers, code monkeys. We handle the day to day data loads for the applications the end users need... like CPAs, Doctors, and Police (who get paid the worst of all four of us, and get shot at). We need to be good at what we do, sure. But noone's sitting on us. If you want to prove you're better, sure, you need to go do that. For 3 years I didn't pick up a book except as a reference, I just sailed along training while I was working.
Now, all that said - you claim being a DBA is working out for you, and if that's the case, more power to you. Hey, if a good DBA assignment comes up NOW, I will take it - but it's gonna be my very last, and not for more than 3 months, likelier 2. All I can say is - if I were to stay in IT long term, I'd move to Phoenix, take you out for "Beer, wings and pool" on those Friday nights when I'm not on the prowl, and plod happily on for another couple of decades.
You wouldn't be happy then here, either, except for the fact that you could find work. The doctors and CPAs still make more then I do. 😉
And as long as you're HAPPPY doing what you're doing, that's all that counts.
I like the (legal) money, the happiness is secondary. It's what I do.
Never stop learning, even if it hurts. Ego bruises are practically mandatory as you learn unless you've never risked enough to make a mistake.
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