RE: Re: Oracle 911 Article

When you're Oracle Consulting, if you don't train your people, people leave. A lot of people of course leave even when you do... But those guys have a tough time of keeping good technical people, because since they're a product company, they have to hit higher margins than their pure-consulting competitors (Accenture, etc.). Oracle Consulting has to make up the difference either in higher rates, or higher billable utilization per consultant. Of course, choosing the higher utilization option accelerates the burnout phenonenon...

Cary Millsap
Hotsos Enterprises, Ltd.
http://www.hotsos.com
* Nullius in verba *

Upcoming events:

- Performance Diagnosis 101: 3/23 Park City, 4/6 Seattle
- Hotsos Symposium 2004: March 7-10 Dallas
- Visit www.hotsos.com for schedule details...

-----Original Message-----
From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org
[mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Mladen Gogala Sent: Saturday, March 06, 2004 11:41 PM
To: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Re: Re: Oracle 911 Article

On 03/07/2004 12:21:55 AM, Cary Millsap wrote:
> Expected revenue for an Oracle consultant was about 4x salary, but
only
> about 1.3x the company's actual cost of the employee, when you include
> things like benefits, bonuses, training, management, administrative,
> legal, and so on. It's a rough business to try to stay in.
>

As Bob Dylan would sing, the times have changed. Very few companies are actually willing to pay for training, because there is a good quality
talent literally on the street. Database professionals, just like everybody else, are expected to train themselves, buy their own books and play with their own machines. It isn't fair, but it does cut down the competition. If these hard times last for another year, very few people will actually know how to manage Oracle 10g. Consequently, there will be very few qualified
DBAs/data managers/performance analysts. Oracle pulling out of the business
will actually help to those who remain standing. I must confess that I would be afraid to live from contract to contract these days and that I've looked for safe harbor. I hope to stay in shape and resume contracting once the situation improves. I believe that small and medium size companies will not find economic justification in outsourcing and that more and more small companies will need to have an overall DBA/performance
analyst/data manager who will even do some development with the tools like DBI or PHP, the language that I'm learning right now. Once the smoke
clears, it's going to be much better.

-- 
Mladen Gogala
Oracle DBA
----------------------------------------------------------------
Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com
----------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe send email to:  oracle-l-request_at_freelists.org
put 'unsubscribe' in the subject line.
--
Archives are at http://www.freelists.org/archives/oracle-l/
FAQ is at http://www.freelists.org/help/fom-serve/cache/1.html
-----------------------------------------------------------------

----------------------------------------------------------------
Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com
----------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe send email to:  oracle-l-request_at_freelists.org
put 'unsubscribe' in the subject line.
--
Archives are at http://www.freelists.org/archives/oracle-l/
FAQ is at http://www.freelists.org/help/fom-serve/cache/1.html
-----------------------------------------------------------------