Thinking about some sort of database certification

[rousseau]

What Bilby is trying to say is.. don't learn DB2.

Heh, I took a DB2 course back in College, and got an A. I didn't find it particularly difficult, but I never put it to use either.

Oracle seems to be the way to go, all of your big IT companies will likely be using it. From a user perspective, like simply writing queries, there does not seem to be a big difference between Oracle, MS SQL, and MySQL. I have used all three in back to back to back gigs, and there was very little difference in writing queries. You mostly just have to get used to how each one treats Joins.

At my current job we have a much smaller IT shop than I was used to, and I had to learn Postgres. I hated Postgres at first, the interface is horrendous, but there is still not much difference when it comes to writing queries, so it didn't take long for me to get used to it.

Getting back to the OP, though, I would learn Oracle, as I think the higher paying corporate jobs are going to be found in Oracle. If you are interested in working for a smaller company, or a startup, MySQL, or Postgres are probably more relevant skillsets. You also usually won't have to worry about experience as much, as a startup is more willing to take risks when hiring. Demonstrating your knowledge, and being personable in an interview will help you out more.

I also have a few questions for Underseer. What has your focus in IT been up to this point? Are you willing to make a move from Chicago? The market for developers down here in St. Louis is currently wide open, and very competitive. Our company has been struggling with finding good Java developers, and even more trouble finding full stack web devs (we use Java and Backbone).

Java and Backbone.. exactly what I've been using for the last year and a bit.

I can see how it'd be a struggle to find full-stack. In my town, which apparently is similar in size to St. Louis, almost everyone specialises. You're either a front-end dev, a java dev, a php dev, and occasionally a .NET dev.

The program I graduated out of pumps out some pretty solid, rounded programmers, but there's only about 10-15 really good programmers out of it a year, and the majority of them migrate out of the city eventually.

 

[Underseer]

What Bilby is trying to say is.. don't learn DB2.

Heh, I took a DB2 course back in College, and got an A. I didn't find it particularly difficult, but I never put it to use either.

Oracle seems to be the way to go, all of your big IT companies will likely be using it. From a user perspective, like simply writing queries, there does not seem to be a big difference between Oracle, MS SQL, and MySQL. I have used all three in back to back to back gigs, and there was very little difference in writing queries. You mostly just have to get used to how each one treats Joins.

At my current job we have a much smaller IT shop than I was used to, and I had to learn Postgres. I hated Postgres at first, the interface is horrendous, but there is still not much difference when it comes to writing queries, so it didn't take long for me to get used to it.

Getting back to the OP, though, I would learn Oracle, as I think the higher paying corporate jobs are going to be found in Oracle. If you are interested in working for a smaller company, or a startup, MySQL, or Postgres are probably more relevant skillsets. You also usually won't have to worry about experience as much, as a startup is more willing to take risks when hiring. Demonstrating your knowledge, and being personable in an interview will help you out more.

I also have a few questions for Underseer. What has your focus in IT been up to this point? Are you willing to make a move from Chicago? The market for developers down here in St. Louis is currently wide open, and very competitive. Our company has been struggling with finding good Java developers, and even more trouble finding full stack web devs (we use Java and Backbone).

I generally have worked at smaller organizations where I am the only computer guy.

I love that. I love having to wear all the hats and take on all the responsibilities. I love not knowing what I'm going to do on any given day. I love not having to do the same thing day in and day out.

Unfortunately, this has resulted in a resume made of pure crap, and I have no real in-depth experience in any one aspect of IT. Jack of all trades and master of none. Heck, not even journeyman. I have no real experience in anything remotely resembling an enterprise environment.

I'm pretty good at rolling out and implementing new systems, but we're talking very small and simple things I was able to cobble together on my own.

I'm pretty decent at tech writing (wrote help files at one job), training others, and writing training materials.

I can do very light and simple programming stuff, but generally just macros and scripts and things, automating things in MS Office, backup scripts, that kind of thing. With any real programming I need a crap ton of hand-holding. Since anything I write is likely to be something I don't look at again for years, I tend to over-comment the fuck out of anything I write.

I stink at network security.

I might be willing to move, but only if I was guaranteed a job at the other end. I really like Chicago, but I like being employed more.

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Oh, and I'm pretty good at help desk, but what kind of career opportunities are in that?

 

[Underseer]

I do have experience managing a major, multimillion dollar project (a company I worked for had a very expensive database system made and I was the go-between between the programmers from the contractor and the executives at my company).

I learned valuable lessons from that experience and would love to try project management, but I have absolutely no fucking clue how to get into that.

My higher math is fairly rusty at this point, but I would love some sort of job in data analysis, which in part is why I'm interested in database training.

 

[rousseau]

The only further advice I have, which might already be something you've internalized, is that your application is really the gateway.

It's something more relevant to people around my age, who tend to write atrocious resumes, but in any case, regardless of your experience, if you're not crafting your resume and selling the experience you do have pretty much perfectly, you're at a major disadvantage, and especially when work experience isn't on your side.

When I was applying for my first internships in college I took about a week or two to do nothing but research 'writing IT resumes', in general the advice went something like this:
- every part of your resume should be focused on solving the problem the company you're applying to has, anything that doesn't solve this problem, doesn't matter
- include a small highlights section at the top of the resume that forces the employer to actually give you attention
- include quantifiable achievements where possible

There's more, but those are the most important items, I think. In your specific position it sounds like experience is working both for and against you. On the one hand you DO have IT experience, on the other hand you don't have a depth of experience. So I think it'd be possible to sell the fact that you're familiar with IT environments/troubleshooting and the like, and to get around the lack of depth your certification / self study would hopefully lead to *actual chops* rather than paper, which you could demonstrate and apply on your application so they might overlook the small experience level.

 

[KeepTalking]

Heh, I took a DB2 course back in College, and got an A. I didn't find it particularly difficult, but I never put it to use either.

Oracle seems to be the way to go, all of your big IT companies will likely be using it. From a user perspective, like simply writing queries, there does not seem to be a big difference between Oracle, MS SQL, and MySQL. I have used all three in back to back to back gigs, and there was very little difference in writing queries. You mostly just have to get used to how each one treats Joins.

At my current job we have a much smaller IT shop than I was used to, and I had to learn Postgres. I hated Postgres at first, the interface is horrendous, but there is still not much difference when it comes to writing queries, so it didn't take long for me to get used to it.

Getting back to the OP, though, I would learn Oracle, as I think the higher paying corporate jobs are going to be found in Oracle. If you are interested in working for a smaller company, or a startup, MySQL, or Postgres are probably more relevant skillsets. You also usually won't have to worry about experience as much, as a startup is more willing to take risks when hiring. Demonstrating your knowledge, and being personable in an interview will help you out more.

I also have a few questions for Underseer. What has your focus in IT been up to this point? Are you willing to make a move from Chicago? The market for developers down here in St. Louis is currently wide open, and very competitive. Our company has been struggling with finding good Java developers, and even more trouble finding full stack web devs (we use Java and Backbone).

I generally have worked at smaller organizations where I am the only computer guy.

I love that. I love having to wear all the hats and take on all the responsibilities. I love not knowing what I'm going to do on any given day. I love not having to do the same thing day in and day out.

Unfortunately, this has resulted in a resume made of pure crap, and I have no real in-depth experience in any one aspect of IT. Jack of all trades and master of none. Heck, not even journeyman. I have no real experience in anything remotely resembling an enterprise environment.

I'm pretty good at rolling out and implementing new systems, but we're talking very small and simple things I was able to cobble together on my own.

I'm pretty decent at tech writing (wrote help files at one job), training others, and writing training materials.

I can do very light and simple programming stuff, but generally just macros and scripts and things, automating things in MS Office, backup scripts, that kind of thing. With any real programming I need a crap ton of hand-holding. Since anything I write is likely to be something I don't look at again for years, I tend to over-comment the fuck out of anything I write.

I stink at network security.

I might be willing to move, but only if I was guaranteed a job at the other end. I really like Chicago, but I like being employed more.

- - - Updated - - -

Oh, and I'm pretty good at help desk, but what kind of career opportunities are in that?

I can see where your predicament is. Every IT shop has a general IT guy, or two. The guy who sets up your machine when you first start, helps you install proprietary software, swaps out hardware, and the like. Those jobs are few and far between, though, and I'm not all that familiar with the pay scale. Those guys are indispensable for the organization, so there tends to be little turnover, and sometimes one person literally supports dozens of, if not a hundred or so, IT staff. One of our IT guys just transitioned to a front end dev a few months ago, but you don't see it happen very often.

As far as help desk goes, that can be a dead end job if you don't work really hard to get out of it. I do have a very good friend who does that sort of thing, and for a while he was the help desk for a startup, and was starting to draw a bigger salary than me. The company went belly up last year, though, and he was one of the last to hang on, even when they were having trouble paying him. Luckily he has some rental income, because the only job he could get after that was as a road tech at a terribly run computer repair shop. He just landed a new job doing help desk for a law firm last week. They at least pay well and he has experience doing that kind of support, but it isn't exactly the kind of gig he wants to keep doing for any length of time.

I did computer repair right out of college, and then did some help desk at an eCommerce company for about nine months myself. The help desk job was at a startup that was in the process of being bought out, so it was growing, and there was a lot of opportunity. I got into QA there, and started doing automation in Perl and Selenium/Java, I also had some experience with JS and CSS from my time doing help desk. It was a short step to development from there, but I have a degree in Programming and Analysis, so that bolstered my experience.

I guess what I am saying is, if you can get your foot in the door at the right company, doing help desk or general IT work, you can work your way up if you have the right combination of skill, personality, and luck.

 

[James Brown]

Unfortunately, this has resulted in a resume made of pure crap, and I have no real in-depth experience in any one aspect of IT. Jack of all trades and master of none. Heck, not even journeyman. I have no real experience in anything remotely resembling an enterprise environment.

That can cut both ways, Underseer. At my IT job, I only do a handful of things repeatedly. A large part of my job is filling out web forms to get other teams to do things. And as a result, I'm not thrilled with my resume either. I'm very good at doing one specific job here at my company, but when I get laid off (they lay off five percent of my team every year--sooner or later my number will be up) I'm not sure how I'll compete in the marketplace.

My resume shows that I can administer Windows servers.

"Can you administer IIS?"

No

"What about Azure?"

No.

"Anything involving Exchange?"

No.

"Security? Programming? Architecture? Capacity Planning? DBA work?"

No.

"Thanks for coming in. We'll let you know if we need anything further."

Like I said earlier, I've gone back to "school" to get my feet wet with Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, Linux, Network Security, and Java Programming. And every time it goes nowhere because I don't use it in my current job, and because other positions want more than just "went to school for this technology but have no real-world experience."

When push comes to shove, I'm pretty sure I could do well as the Many-Hats guy for a small shop--mostly because I'm not afraid of computers and I can Google what I need--but I'm also pretty sure I'll have to take a big paycut.

 

[Malintent]

Maybe this will help a bit?

Wow, that list is overwhelming. I simply don't have experience with enterprise-level stuff and a lot of those terms are just vague concepts to me. What's a good starting point?

Start with SQL. Every database solution has their own extension of the language (Microsoft SQLServer uses T-SQL, aka Transact-SQL, for example). But, ever single DBMS uses the basic form of SQL, which is called ANSI SQL. All the other cusom versions of SQL just add on to the basic language. Learn it first.

I am of the opinion (30 years in IT here.. and I make very good money doing what I do today), that between SQL and any scripting language, those two skills together are sufficient to rule the world... or at least any sized Enterprise. Add Active Directory knowledge to that and you would be the most valuable person in IT Engineering.

Those are the 'hard-skills'.. 'soft-skills' like business finances, personnel management, Vendor management (huge!).. are all lucrative skills to have in IT management.

 

[rousseau]

Wow, that list is overwhelming. I simply don't have experience with enterprise-level stuff and a lot of those terms are just vague concepts to me. What's a good starting point?

Start with SQL. Every database solution has their own extension of the language (Microsoft SQLServer uses T-SQL, aka Transact-SQL, for example). But, ever single DBMS uses the basic form of SQL, which is called ANSI SQL. All the other cusom versions of SQL just add on to the basic language. Learn it first.

I am of the opinion (30 years in IT here.. and I make very good money doing what I do today), that between SQL and any scripting language, those two skills together are sufficient to rule the world... or at least any sized Enterprise. Add Active Directory knowledge to that and you would be the most valuable person in IT Engineering.

Those are the 'hard-skills'.. 'soft-skills' like business finances, personnel management, Vendor management (huge!).. are all lucrative skills to have in IT management.

Yea, I'd second this.

SQL isn't really a 'thing you should know'.. it's a 'thing you must know', and is literally the foundation of all other skills in that list.

The good news is is that SQL isn't actually very hard. You have a database with tables that should be up to third normal form (you should understand proper table normalization.. which is how to properly construct a table so the data is easily queryable), and your assumption is that SQL can do literally fucking anything with the data. Usually people learn SQL via the route of: 1) get task 2) figure out how to do task with SQL 3) repeat.. but a good place to start is understanding the major keywords: select, insert, update, delete, join, and not as common but my favourite SQL keyword: 'IN'. After that you will find a solution for literally any problem on Stack Overflow.

Most of the other skills listed grow out of your experience manipulating data with SQL. Then you move toward protecting and reporting on data with other tools built into whatever software you're using.