MasterRacker
Active member
I haven’t been very active in the forums lately as my energy has been directed toward re-employing myself. I thought I would throw out a couple of observations though and see what other members are seeing in the marketplace.
I’m near Minneapolis/St. Paul. My background is back-end support of Servers, LAN, phone, desktops, intranet etc., in a small to mid-size environment, not enterprise class server clusters/farms, etc.
We all know that pretty much everything is in a database now so it’s natural that I’m seeing a number of postings for DBAs and those are mostly for large systems. I’m not seeing much for support/operations types of positions except at the large enterprise level or entry level help desk.
One of my guesses here is that since the technology is maturing, smaller companies are finding it easier to outsource support or just plain don’t need the manpower since I know from experience over the years that Windows systems are much less labor intensive to support than they once were. My extrapolation is that even when the economy picks up, the support side of things will continue to lag or may even contract.
The other main thing I’m seeing is that most of the job postings, even excluding the DBAs, want programming/development experience, either OO or Web or both. This would seem to contradict what the trade mags have been saying about outsourcing killing the programmer market. Obviously there is a lot of programming being sent overseas, but there seems to still be a demand locally for in-house developers. My guess here is that what’s being outsourced is the heavy duty coding portion of large commercial systems, while in-house custom systems are still being done in-house in a lot of places.
I seems to me that the long term market, at least in this region, is trending toward developers, which means I would need to update my old and moldy programming skills. Development, of course, is a natural for consulting in the future if someone wants to go that way so it’s not all bad.
What are others seeing? Am I missing something is this the way it’s going presently?
Jeff
If your mind is too open your brains will fall out...
I’m near Minneapolis/St. Paul. My background is back-end support of Servers, LAN, phone, desktops, intranet etc., in a small to mid-size environment, not enterprise class server clusters/farms, etc.
We all know that pretty much everything is in a database now so it’s natural that I’m seeing a number of postings for DBAs and those are mostly for large systems. I’m not seeing much for support/operations types of positions except at the large enterprise level or entry level help desk.
One of my guesses here is that since the technology is maturing, smaller companies are finding it easier to outsource support or just plain don’t need the manpower since I know from experience over the years that Windows systems are much less labor intensive to support than they once were. My extrapolation is that even when the economy picks up, the support side of things will continue to lag or may even contract.
The other main thing I’m seeing is that most of the job postings, even excluding the DBAs, want programming/development experience, either OO or Web or both. This would seem to contradict what the trade mags have been saying about outsourcing killing the programmer market. Obviously there is a lot of programming being sent overseas, but there seems to still be a demand locally for in-house developers. My guess here is that what’s being outsourced is the heavy duty coding portion of large commercial systems, while in-house custom systems are still being done in-house in a lot of places.
I seems to me that the long term market, at least in this region, is trending toward developers, which means I would need to update my old and moldy programming skills. Development, of course, is a natural for consulting in the future if someone wants to go that way so it’s not all bad.
What are others seeing? Am I missing something is this the way it’s going presently?
Jeff
If your mind is too open your brains will fall out...