Stack Exchange administrators love computers

One very large and successful site in the technology world is the Stack Exchange collection of sites. They’ve grown and scales with relatively few people, and they have chosen to host thier own systems as opposed to moving to the cloud? Why? One of the administrators talks about it in this blog post. The short answer: they love computers.

That’s pretty cool from my perspective. They have a passion for their jobs, they like the different aspects of it, and they aren’t going to change that to save a few dollars or make their jobs easier. They don’t want to avoid responsibility for parts of their jobs, they want to embrace all of their jobs, as something they enjoy doing.

That’s very cool, and it makes sense for a small company. However I’d hope that even at larger companies there were people that enjoyed their job. I know some DBAs love hardware, and enjoy digging into the specs and enjoying going over the configuration of every new server they procure. Me? I’d like to have three drops downs, with options for CPU, RAM, and disk, and be done with it, letting the people that do love hardware pick the actual configuration. Hopefully all of us love our jobs working with data.

Life is short, and while there will always be things we don’t enjoy about our jobs, there should be plenty of things we do. If there aren’t, I’d hope we’d all be looking for some other job that we do enjoy.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

• Watch the Windows Media Podcast – 14.9MB WMV 
• Watch the iPod Video Podcast – 15.4MB MP4 
• Watch the MP3 Audio Podcast – 3.2MB MP3