Slightly OT, and a cautionary tale

For those who care about personal notes ... the large IT services company I work for recently lost their contract to an 'offshore' firm. I've been here over 21 years, first as an employee of the client company, then an employee of the services company when the client decided to outsource. I didn't like the future prospects at my current employer and found another Oracle DBA job at another company in the area .. one that had outsourced, then brought it back in-house. Will be starting there next week.

Now the cautionary tale .... we started with oracle at v. 7.3.4 on Win NT 3.11 and two DBA's. Myself, coming from the apps side with a mix of mainframe and client/server experience, and the other coming from DB2/MVS. Over the years I've grabbed every opportunity to learn as much as possible, especially grabbing a chance to start supporting Oracle on unix systems. I've spent a lot of time in this ng, takeing some lumps along the way, but learning a lot. I've stocked my personal library, and taken CBT courses when funds weren't available for live classwork.

 On the other hand, my partner has used every excuse to not learn anything new. He drags his feet on upgrades, doesn't read any more than necessary to solve the ORA-nnnnn problem at hand, and refuses to engage in any learning activity except for (rare) company paid live classes, and digs in his heels whenever I've tried to get him engaged on the unix side of things.

Result? We both started circulating our resumes at about the same time. Within a month of beginning my job search, I'd had on-site interviews with two companies, a job offer, and a signed commitment. He's complaining to me that he can't get past an initial phone interview.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. Sometimes, you can't even get them to recognize the water. Received on Thu Apr 06 2006 - 14:19:51 CDT