This T-SQL Tuesday is from a new host, Josephine Bush, leader of the Boulder group just North of me. It’s an interesting invitation, asking what our job titles really mean. I like this as the titles do affect how our industry advances and what opportunities are available to us.
I manage the tsqltuesday party, so if you want to host, ping me.
The DBA
When I was a software developer, I worked with a DBA that made a lot of $$$. That was very attractive to me. So, I pursued that title. There were few of them in any company, and I needed to learn SQL, modeling, performance, etc. but once I got to that point, I found it was a good job.
These days I see some companies with DBAs, but lots of the customers I work with don’t have DBAs as a title and have some sysadmin or developer doing those jobs.
New Titles
The invitation shows other titles, but often what I see is titles are for HR and pay levels. The job often is very similar. I see DBAs/Database Engineers/Database Reliability Engineer, often doing very similar work. They might watch over servers with admin stuff (backup/security, etc). They might do DevOps, IaaC, deployments, they might also do modeling and consulting with devs.
Database Developer is something I see often, sometimes with BI developer, and often they do the same work. The former might do more T-SQL on OLTP systems and the latter might only want to work with BI/OLAP/warehouse systems. However, I find people who want to limit themselves are limiting opportunities and might be those that don’t hold onto a job for a long time. That being said, I do find some BI developers might not have access to all development databases, but database developers often do.
I’ve seen a few data scientists. They’ve been around for years, there has been a big push to get them to work on ML/AI systems, and I see less of that in the last few years as there AI tech grows and gets more commoditized. It doesn’t seem that as many companies want to pay highly for this role. I have no idea what they do other than lots of ETL and experiments to try and get a computer to make better decisions from data.
Architects – I know a few people that have this role, but I don’t see a lot of them. These are usually people that evaluate tech, set standards, and try to oversee a common direction for database designs or tech, however, I also find these people need to be doing other work to justify their existence. They often fill in where work is needed.
In general, I think titles sometimes reflect a specialization of a portion of technology, but aren’t necessarily needed. I’ve been a DBA and done all the things the invitation lists for various roles. However, I find that if I wanted to be a database engineer rather than a database administator, I could likely justify a higher salary.
My advice is pick the title that has a good salary and aim for it. Learn all the skills, since the title might not matter when someone needs work done.
Voice of the DBA 