My advice is still to just take the damn vacation. You can always make more money later.

Yea I def wouldn't want to do that.

Gotcha, I will consider this post the final and deciding factor (not really being facetious).

sql follow-up

apparently it was just the intro to this class that was god awful. We've shed a lot of students since the first 2-3 classes, but the coursework and book design are a lot better now. Like, immeasurably better.

Though everyone says this is supposed to be one of the hardest courses our uni offers, I think it's going to end up being one of my favorites. The teaching style is right up my alley: offer just enough information to nearly solve a problem and have to use your brain to get the rest of the way.

So used to teachers just telling you stuff and having you repeat it that it's kind of like waking up from a long sleep to have one that challenges you to logically consider why something works the way it does.

Also, being able to throw elaborately-designed, piddly commands at a computer and get back loads of perfectly-formatted, probably useless but interesting info is just the sort of thing I love. >.<

Sounds like being a DBA is going to be your career choice!

i dunno, average salary is like 10 grand lower than software dev

High end DBAs easily make 160-220k

At the professional services firm I have referenced working at before, my boss placed 3 DBAs at a company doing basically Oracle sapps cloud hosting and they were all making between 180-220k. I think one was 240k.

I get the feeling there are more entry-level software dev jobs out there than entry-level dba positions.

Seeing as how I've already tried the whole "get a bunch of certs and break into a field that demands experience" thing once to no avail, not exactly excited by the prospect of trying it again.

Weird, when I look for jobs, I have a feeling there are no entry-level jobs. Most of them are asking for 2-3 years or above.

Also yea I agree, the "get a bunch of certs and break into a field that demands experience" is such a myth. And whenever people tell me to do that instead, I just nod my head and smile.

I hear many of them count school as 2-4 years (if you went to a 2 or 4 year school).

I'm lucky that we have a large recruiter in the area that sees value in students with 2 year degrees, so hopefully I'll get on somewhere sooner than later.

Heck, Gizmo said she's got a friend who went to this school and couldn't even finish a 2 year degree before getting hired on somewhere.

Hoping for similar results.

also, just heard about coderbyte. Always fun to play around on these things, but good lord, at least for java it seems like every single exercise is "do something weird with a string"

Which is fine, but when we're working with numbers only, it seems a bit strange.

like, if i was at an interview and they asked me to do some of the things that are exercises there, i might just leave.

Yea I always hated the questions that have to do with string manipulation. It seems like every coding interview website/book has a hard on for those type of questions.

Seems like my employer posts every job as a Senior role and then ends up hiring a new grad or a current co-op a good chunk of the time.

Company-level hiring slightly favors new grads but hiring managers massively prefer experienced hires. New grads are worth hiring from a large company's perspective, but usually not from the hiring manager's perspective because a lot of the value of inexperienced hires comes from lower costs, higher ceiling, potential to grow in a different direction (thus outside of the hiring manager's area), most of which the hiring manager doesn't care about. On the other hand, the manager has to deal with all the downsides like training costs, risk of the hire flaking out or simply deciding that this is not what they want to do, lower initial level of performance, etc.

How does one go about getting contract work without those connections in place already?

I'm happy at my job but could use some extra money working 10-30 hours a week on the side.

Our DBA drives and races a porsche and owns a couple houses in LA. The key is to get in somewhere then over time become so entrenched with proprietary knowledge that it would be a disaster if you leave. My managers basically beg the guy to do things. He does it if he feels like it.

I went to a bootcamp in San Francisco, no prior tech experience and no CS degree, and applied to 497 jobs (sometimes outside the area or in other states). I would often still apply if it said 2+ years experience but usually not more than that.

Not sure if you're supposed to be comforted or horrified by this but I landed in a great spot.

Hmm interesting, I guess that's good to hear. I'm trying my hardest to stay motivated and get my own personal iOS app out so I can start applying. I think with an app in the app store and a Google Summer of Code project (iOS related) , my resume should look good.

This is why no one cares what DirectTV does.

Yet everyone knows exactly what Netflix is doing.

We have use several contractors from www.weworkremotely.com that fit your description.

Lol, this is awesome.

There are many options in SQL aside from Jr DBA. If memory serves me right, I've only applied for one job that was explicitly Jr DBA. You have ETL (extract, transform, load), business / marketing / sales analysts, some oddball SQL developer, and many other little jobs.

The reason they want 2 years of experience isn't a whimsy, it is dead serious. The first reason is that it takes a strange bird to actually want to do SQL. It is low-level, dirty, and just ugly. You wouldn't want to hire a fresh-face, train them, and have them quit. Every interviewer asks me why I love working with data and SQL.

The second reason is that you have to have exposure to large and ugly data. There are too many traps inherent to data, no matter how clean it is. You also have to be able to understand the difference between a query written for a small table that self-joins, and a query that joins across multiple tables and millions of rows. Very different concepts. You also have to be able to show you can scale your knowledge to 1,000 or more tables. You have to show you understand why 4NF is important. I'd say, at the minimum for basic SQL, you would have to be able to read and understand SQL Antipatterns.

No place that I've applied for would allow you to work with an IDE or admin tool (PgAdmin or MySQL Workbench (horrible, but still)). This means you must be good with vi or emacs, preferably vi, but best to be able to use both. See what just happened here? That means that nice tabular view you are getting is no longer available. You have to be able to write queries with zero visualization and be able to prove that they work, through intuition (the 2 years of experience helps here) and a collection of classical models (Venn Diagrams, yo). The standard is generally zero mistakes allowed, showing that you can release buggy and incorrect data is a death knell on a test.

And of course, you have to have some exposure to awful data. The years of experience, where you want to kill the idiots who dropped their silly bomb of unsanitized data on you, counts for a lot here.

Since you are no longer able to use an IDE, you have to be able to work with the command line, run bash / batch scripts, and talk to a remote server from your local machine. That means you have to learn some Linux and SQL administration (permissions, roles, IP permissions, etc)

Finally, learn some python (without an IDE, obv) for scripting. Only one place used Ruby instead of Python. Even the windows shop used Python for ETL and scripting.

That's the minimum you would need to not embarrass yourself at an interview. I never embarrassed myself, so there is that (did at least 30 interviews). I suspect having a degree would help you a lot to find a job, or at the least, and internship, where you are allowed to make a mistake 1/4% of the time. Even though I have all the checkmarks, it is still very difficult to get into the field.

Uh... and for those who wonder why a CS class "wastes" its time teaching low-level and non-abstract concepts, well, there would be no DBAs if they didn't.

Yeah, see, that doesn't sound appealing.

Actually, the SQL language itself is high-level, declarative, and pretty readable and user-friendly. The original version was called SEQUEL (Structured English QUEry Language) -- with the intention that you can express complex queries in ordinary English. I believe there was a vision of secretaries and non-technical managers using it with ease. It has obviously failed at this goal:

yet nevertheless it's more declarative and much, much easier to learn and understand than something truly low-level and dirty like assembly language, or even C for that matter.

All that said, I understand where your sentiment comes from. In the real, day to day life of working with SQL regularly, the declarative dream of the SQL language reveals itself for the leaky abstraction that it is, and you must understand things like indexes and the implementation of JOINs to optimize queries, or sometimes even to write reasonable ones. And there are many other dirty details that fill up your time.

But I thought it was worth pointing out the distinction between these things and the SQL language itself, which, imo, isn't bad at all.

I just don't know what word to use for the collection of people who work with SQL from selects down to the raw data. Find a phrase you are comfortable with and do find / replace.

But yeah, SQL is a leaky abstraction. I suppose you could train anyone to write simple select queries over views or a small collection of tables, but to be really good at select, you have to be able to build tables and learn how to build them properly, so you end up having to learn the language upside down, sort of.You can run queries off tables that are non-relational or bad-formed tables, but the real magic is learning how to work with well-formed data and learning how to deal with the exceptions, not vice versa.

Someone mentioned a while back they thought it was crazy the niggling things companies are offering as services anymore. As a follow up:

http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/06/api...80741173167063