Put Me To Work For You

(The Executive Summary: I left my job last week, and I start working at The Pythian Group on Monday. Go to their website if you’d like to work with me, or with people just as knowledgeable as me.)

I get inquiries all the time about consulting. Folks are madly searching for experienced MySQL DBAs. The lure of a new environment is always tempting, however, working for any one environment has its quirks. In October I realized I was coming up on having worked 2 years at my job. That’s not a very long period of time, but it certainly was long enough for me to learn the environment and get stuck in a rut — mostly my rut was doing more systems work than database work.

I looked around for other places of work, and had a wonderful interview at an awesome company to boot. However, they were also a product company, and I’d decided that I wanted to move to a service company. That is, a company that provides database services to a wide variety of environments. A company that sells products still usually has one environment, or at least one environment that I would work in. With a service-oriented company, such as a consulting firm, I can gain the experience of many environments and many setups.

Learning from my co-workers is important too — too many shops have only 1 or 2 MySQL DBA positions, which leaves me with 1 or 0 MySQL colleagues at work. Being the big fish in a small pond has its advantages, but it’s also too easy to get caught in my own ways of doing things and not see another side of things.

So, I thought about where I’d want to work. There are many great MySQL consulting firms out there. I looked at the ones I knew about — most of the ones run by Planet MySQLers I ruled out because either I didn’t have the right skillset (I’m not a programmer, C or otherwise!) or because I thought there might be personality conflicts, or because I’d have to move.

That was a big one — having to move. I have to stay in the Boston area, at least for now. My husband and I discussed things, and we’re not willing to move right now. Also, I hate too much travel. Anything more than 10% really wears me down. And that, sadly, put MySQL’s own consulting out of the running. I just cannot travel that much.

So where does that leave me? Well, I called up The Pythian Group and we had a few hours of great phone conversations.

Next week, I fly to Ottawa for training! There will be a Boston office opening, but that’s after I finish 2-3 weeks of training.

I’m very excited to learn more about how The Pythian Group operates, as well as getting down and dirty with different environments, and solving lots of problems.

(The Executive Summary: I left my job last week, and I start working at The Pythian Group on Monday. Go to their website if you’d like to work with me, or with people just as knowledgeable as me.)

I get inquiries all the time about consulting. Folks are madly searching for experienced MySQL DBAs. The lure of a new environment is always tempting, however, working for any one environment has its quirks. In October I realized I was coming up on having worked 2 years at my job. That’s not a very long period of time, but it certainly was long enough for me to learn the environment and get stuck in a rut — mostly my rut was doing more systems work than database work.

I looked around for other places of work, and had a wonderful interview at an awesome company to boot. However, they were also a product company, and I’d decided that I wanted to move to a service company. That is, a company that provides database services to a wide variety of environments. A company that sells products still usually has one environment, or at least one environment that I would work in. With a service-oriented company, such as a consulting firm, I can gain the experience of many environments and many setups.

Learning from my co-workers is important too — too many shops have only 1 or 2 MySQL DBA positions, which leaves me with 1 or 0 MySQL colleagues at work. Being the big fish in a small pond has its advantages, but it’s also too easy to get caught in my own ways of doing things and not see another side of things.

So, I thought about where I’d want to work. There are many great MySQL consulting firms out there. I looked at the ones I knew about — most of the ones run by Planet MySQLers I ruled out because either I didn’t have the right skillset (I’m not a programmer, C or otherwise!) or because I thought there might be personality conflicts, or because I’d have to move.

That was a big one — having to move. I have to stay in the Boston area, at least for now. My husband and I discussed things, and we’re not willing to move right now. Also, I hate too much travel. Anything more than 10% really wears me down. And that, sadly, put MySQL’s own consulting out of the running. I just cannot travel that much.

So where does that leave me? Well, I called up The Pythian Group and we had a few hours of great phone conversations.

Next week, I fly to Ottawa for training! There will be a Boston office opening, but that’s after I finish 2-3 weeks of training.

I’m very excited to learn more about how The Pythian Group operates, as well as getting down and dirty with different environments, and solving lots of problems.

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