Comment Boys and girls (Score 2) 72
I remember a story about the famous pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock. When told that a child's gender could be determined by the shape of the skull at birth, he replied "I prefer the traditional methods..."
I remember a story about the famous pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock. When told that a child's gender could be determined by the shape of the skull at birth, he replied "I prefer the traditional methods..."
15 years ago I left development, to take an offer to become an (Oracle) DBA. Intelligent employers, while hard to find, recognize that DBA's with dev background bring a wealth of knowledge about what works and what doesn't. And the specialized skills of DBA's can demand a premium in the job market.
Walking away from development and into production-side database work was probably the best career move I've made in 30 years.
And there are still opportunities to get your hands dirty. I'm constantly creating Perl scripts for monitoring...coworker DBA's set up web pages...some DBA's do hardware configuration (servers, SANs)...
My personal servers tend toward gibson, fender, takamine...you get the idea.
No computer can help a human understand a simile, much less an abstraction that's often in the guise of a complex historical or literary reference (i.e. metaphor).
IBM might dispute that, now that Watson's won at Jeopardy.
One in three can actually farm, since they travel with their bacteria.
I guess that means that two in three are accepting agricultural subsidies instead of farming?
About 15 years ago the first of the grandkids showed up. The next year, the parents and grandparents and great-grandparents got together and decided that we adults would not exchange presents any more. We continue to get some for the little kids because they're still trying to figure out what this is all about.
Instead of adult-to-adult gift exchanges, the adults all take the money we would've spent on each other and pump it into college accounts for the next generation of the extended family. The first of the grandkids is approaching college age. Over the years, we've all contributed enough that her first year or two of college will cost the parents nothing.
A side benefit of this is that it puts some of the burden of college expenses on those who can afford it. The generation below mine is still trying to figure out how to make payments on their first house and a second car (so both can work), let alone put a kid through school. otoh, my generation and my parents' generation are well established financially, and can easily afford to help defray the college expenses.
And I can personally attest that it's very satisfying to be able to share in this way.
And it was fast.
The politics is much lower on the production support side, which gets you out of most of the BS. No requirements drift, fewer communications problems, no crunch-to-meet-the-deadline, etc. So the move's been good for me.
But I've also noticed that my tolerance for BS in every area of my life has dropped as I've aged. Like the time when a grocery clerk had some apples and a box of cereal on the weigh station while she was weighing the apples. I pointed out to her that she was weighing the cereal at the same time as the apples and the weight / price would be wrong. "No," she indicated, "the scanner will read the cereal and get the price right." After a couple of minutes a manager came over, removed the cereal and weighed the apples. I left before she explained the issue to the clerk, who was still wondering how the apples dropped by a pound.
It's become quite a struggle, as I grow older, not to stand up and shout whenever someone makes a decision solely for political reasons, or when they don't understand the value of training employees of any age bracket, or when I work for someone who's incapable of making a decision. In my younger days it was easier simply to ignore it, but now in my late-50's it's sometimes quite an effort to ignore the BS that comes my way.
People talk about how you should "pick your battles." Walking away from the BS, on my terms, was my way to pick my battles.
You will have many recoverable tape errors.