In kind of a full-circle, or multiple full-circle thought at dinner tonight, I was thinking about consulting. The beginning of this train of thought was a consultant who had been hired by my employer to help up speed things up, because right now, things kinda suck. It’s not the first time that has happened at a job I’ve been at, and to some degree, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. There are people out there that have a lot of time to dedicate to a specific skill and they can get very good at it because they are not busy adding features and fixing bugs as requested by millions of users.
Me, with my very long career and plenty of experience had a little bit of skepticism about this guy. You know, I don’t know the guy at all. But duh, there’s this thing called the Internet, and if the guy is really as good as he should be, I would certainly be able to find him online. And that search pretty much shut me up. I found a few bio pages on him and his video channel where he discusses and demonstrates what he does. And while I had a pretty good gist of what was discussed in the first video I watched, it was still on topics that I had never heard of in my years of development. Never. But you, know, I would have loved to hear about them. It’s just that work and life got in the way.
And there’s reality number one for me. If you look around, you’ll find I have a blog for programming and tech stuff. I haven’t posted in it for a very long time. I’m just sort of out of the game. I thought maybe I could retire into consulting, but now I’m not so sure. Things haven’t stopped, but I haven’t been exploring like I used to. I still try new things, but I’m not pushing the envelope like I used to. And this consultant is like in a different realm of technique and troubleshooting.
So I’ve sort of made peace that I’m probably not cut out for that life. And I probably never was, because I’m not an entrepreneur anyway. I can’t run a business, I like doing the business. And also, as mentioned, I’m out of the game. This consultant is like 20 years younger than me. Back then, I was sort of doing the same thing, out on the edge, so it’s familiar to me in a nostalgic way as well. Ah, listen to the old man talking…
And that led me to other related thoughts. The people that I work with, who are also like 20 years younger than me, they aren’t like that consultant. Given the chance, I think a couple could be, but while they have age and the drive on their side, they are being held back by where they are and what they’re doing. They’re just programmers. And now I can sort of bring everything together here.
A lot of the techniques this consultant is using, we can’t use. We don’t have the permissions to do it. That’s just how it works for any reasonable security-minded corporation. Developers can’t be database administrators. They hire specialized database administrators for that job. But DBA’s aren’t developers, or aren’t skilled developers, and even if they were, they wouldn’t be touching the code at the company – that’s another security boundary. So you have developers and DBAs that each are good at what they do, but they aren’t allowed to touch each other’s areas, and to really make things work the best they can, you need people who can work in both. That’s what the consultant can do. And when he’s gone, we won’t have that anymore. And that’s kind of why we ended up in the position we are now. So while there’s no shame in hiring a consultant to point out how we can fix our problems, to not give us the capabilities to solve those kinds of problems in the future is a little sad.
Now back to the people who could do it. Young, go-getters, eager to learn. Well, they just can’t have that opportunity working here. Best-case scenario would be that they set up a home lab and experiment at home in their free time. But it’ll never compare to real-world stuff like what we do. Each job I’ve had presented a unique technical wrinkle that added to my skillset. Two jobs ago it was database replication to 45 sites across the country. My previous job had a massive database of half a billion images. Now this job has data magnitudes greater than anything else I’ve done, but the difference this time is, I can’t touch it. I can’t experiment with it. The best I can get out of the experience is optimizing database queries. I’ll never get to see how the databases are constructed or managed. I’ll never get to experiment on them to see if I can make them any better. I could never get to try the techniques the consultant is explaining in his videos. But this is how security-minded business is. And this is also what all my co-workers are limited to as well.
And looking at that from a wide view, it’s sort of fascinating how a top-rated consultant gets there. Because once a company gets big enough, the security and the segmentation of the teams becomes a requirement, so you can’t get that blended experience from that. You can get to a certain point in startups, in that explosive growth before they "go pro", but how many chances can you get at that in life? For some doing their best programming in a large company, it might be zero. For me, I got my chances at smaller (but still significant) environments, but now in the big leagues, I’ve been shut out.
0 Comments.