[sf-lug] Looking for a Senior MySQL administrator in San Francisco

[Adrien Lamothe]

Actually, working as a consultant requires deep knowledge of the area you are called upon to work in. Companies usually hire consultants after they determine no one in-house can handle the job. I've almost always been hired as a consultant in situations where the application was very specialized and/or other people had failed at it. Most of my early experience was with real-time control systems; people who develop hard real-time control software are a small percentage of the software development community, so that was my edge.

The problem with the particular skill set Greatschools is looking for is that most database administrators are not strong software developers, and vice-versa; although there are exceptions and it is possible. Security is a big issue with database-driven web sites. Good security requires constant vigilance. It is very difficult to maintain an adequate level of vigilance when you are also devleoping software. It makes much more sense to hire someone as a dual database and operating system administrator, and even this only works in a smaller scale operation (like Greatschools). So, you really don't want someone who enjoys "a bit of database management" managing your 7/24/365 database cluster, you really want a dedicated professional DBA.

Project management doesn't conflict with one's primary technical specialty, so adding project management as a requirement isn't a burden. Adding it does take time away from managing that 20 node 24/7/365 database cluster.

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Sarah Mei <sarahmei at gmail.com> wrote: I've done quite a bit of nonprofit tech consulting, and my experience
has been very different from Adrien's.  Nonprofits of 2-3 people, ok,
many of them are on the last fiber of a shoestring when it comes to
tech -- but once they reach the 40-employee stage, they know the
difference between good tech help and bad, and are willing to pay
appropriately for the former.

I thought the post was reasonable.  There are lots of people out there
who enjoy a bit of database management, a bit of programming, a bit of
deployment management, a bit of sys admining...and even a bit of
project management.  They tend to become consultants ;-).  But you
never know when life changes will make you crave a regular salary and
flextime...

Sarah

On 7/11/06, Todd Huss  wrote:
> If you think you might be a good fit by all means please apply and if
> you're called in for an interview you can decide if we seem like a
> penniless fly by night company looking to work you into the ground or
> who knows, maybe you'll find that we're a great company to work for!

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