Or, is it good in general - in light of things going DevOps and open source databases… Thoughts?
14 replies (most recent on top)
My team just moved all DBA responsibilities on to devs. When they say FULL stack developer they f*cking mean it. We do dev, official QA, DBA, DevOps and everything in between. Data model, entity model, automation scripts, test cases, sonar scans/clean-up, hard-gating scans and clean-up, deploys, commits/reviews, reviews of reviews and endless paperwork (JIRA, wiki). I hardly feel like a developer anymore, we get so little actual work done. Laid off QA, probably laid off our DBAs too (might have moved teams, didn't hear). Our app is too big for every dev to know everything, we have to specialize. I would say what app but that would ID me too closely.
At WFC it depends on what the actual DBA work is. There are specialized teams for everything - Support, Infrastructure, performance tuning, scripting, etc. everything is compartmentalized. If you are going to a support role, just don’t. You are completely handcuffed and can do very little these days except refer to one of the other teams.
I wouldn’t take a DBA role here anymore.
Data encryption or anything else having to do with information security is still an expanding career path.
My advice would be to be a generalist and think like a "team of 1" i.e. if you were the only person on your team, would you be able to deliver a "complete feature" independently. Gain the skills needed to do that first.
Most people over emphasize on "data models" and "query performance". Speed of delivery matters in business, even for large organizations like WF and is not limited to Startups. Don't get into the false dichotomy of Large Organization VS Startup.
"create SQL that is functional correct and reads 10 billion rows into buffer..."
First, with modern cost based optimizers, those days are long gone.
Second, with parallel processing, denormalized tables are way of the future, so your skills about optimally creating 3NF tables are of historical interest only.
Finally, yes DBA is a dead end job.
It is more or less a dead job.
It's important to understand why it existed in the first place. A long time ago, if you were building business software on a database at all, it was a very costly commercial database. Wells Fargo was one of the biggest buyers. Imagine 6 or 7 figures a year for the software licenses, the same amount again for a support contract, and a similar amount for the hardware to run it on. If a company is spending $xM+ a year on a critical piece of software infrastructure, that is very complicated in addition to being very expensive, they will usually be very open to spending more on top of that in salary to employ experts to look after it. Those experts are your DBAs.
A funny thing happened when MySQL and Postgres made databases "free": companies (irrationally, IMHO) stopped being willing to pay for experts to run their database software. That duty became a secondary responsibility of developers or operators or both, none of whom really wanted to do it or cared to learn how to do it well. There are counterexamples, sure. Some companies get big enough, and lean on their databases hard enough, that they cultivate true competence in them, but it's rare.
And then along comes AWS RDS (and similar), automating away the most tangible aspects of what DBAs did: HA, backup/restore, configuration, provisioning. There's still plenty left for DBAs to do, but it's stuff people don't understand the value of. As above, the residual DBA duties silently fall to developers and operators.
Also, being able to run databases for zero cost in licensing on small-ish, commodity servers has led us to use more and more of them, rather than giant, central, shared databases. This amplifies all of the above effects. It also has important 2nd-order effects on the social organization of our software-building endeavors.
When databases were shared by many apps, it made sense to think of them as their own services. When each database is built and run to service exactly one app, that makes less sense, plus it's also easier to push everything onto the devs (as above).
Make no mistake, Wells and all these companies still need DBAs. Their schema designs are awful, their query performance is worse, who knows if their backups work, etc etc etc. But we don't see it, because there are so few people working in software today that understand what a DBA is, or ever met (and worked with) a good one.
It's rewarding work if you can get it. I still love doing it. But, outside of the Oracle and Microsoft ecosystems, it's not really a career.
Lol, DBAs at WF are a joke. Two week lead time to run a fu----g script that someone else wrote.
@ fcd+1gEEe4Xb, you’re confusing DBA with data architect, two different roles
If you can model data, build data warehouses, manage and maintain schemas, and help analysts write effective SQL; you'll be employed for a very long time. If your entire focus is on the system administration perspective, that career is quickly disappearing in favor of SaaS/PaaS solutions.
DBA is still a necessary job. I would say more and more so: Over my own now 25 year career in IT, the average developer seems to have less interest/knowledge in data modelling and administration. I don't think you'll find great DBA skills let alone a dedicated role in a small high velocity exciting startup - I feel they'll cloud brute force their way :). But in a large organization, a good DBA is vital. I have 2-3 on my project team and always looking for more.
It is astonishing how much a poorly tuned data request / SQL, or poorly designed data model / table, can impact performance by multiple orders of magnitude. It is also fascinating how much addition of specific index or tuning statistics can help execution. There comes a scale where throwing more hardware on performance problem is prohibitive over hiring a good DBA, as much as current thinking is that "hardware is cheap".
But on a regular basis I'm seeing experienced, serious, dedicated developers create SQL that is functional correct and reads 10 billion rows into buffer in order to sp-t out a single row answer (sometimes of course that's necessary, but usually not :)
As long as you speak Tamil, you should be ok.
I don't know about Wells anymore (been gone for nearly a year), but I can tell you that the way we're building cloud apps now at other places, the databases are managed by the devs. We don't hire DBA's.
It is not good place to go. It is under stuffed and people have to work overtime. There are too much work and you do not have time to take comp time off. There are a lot of overhead tedious work as DBA because of regulations.
All IT is currently bad because it will be eventually outsourced, especially DB admin since it calls for after hours work.
In general, this is not a promising career choice because of the ongoing move to open source. Days of proprietary databases charging millions in licensing fees are gone.