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I had a DBA, very senior, who was working for me on contract while maintaining a full time job at another Silicon Valley company. I was paying him $50K/Year to

I had a DBA, very senior, who was working for me on contract while maintaining a full time job at another Silicon Valley company. I was paying him $50K/Year to ensure that none of our Oracle Systems ever had an issue, and in the event of a problem, he would fix it. What I liked about this arrangement is that he was highly incentivized to ensure that he would have to do the least amount of work, so his deployments were highly automated (including the back end monitoring), and pristine, by the book. I'm pretty sure his other manager knew that he was working two jobs, but because his work here didn't interfere with his job there, everything was kosher.

gaius 9y ago
Was the other company aware of this arrangement too? Just curious.
- untog 9y ago
  > I'm pretty sure his other manager knew that he was working two jobs
cylinder 9y ago
What happened if you did have an issue? Did you mandate service credits into the contract?
- ghshephard 9y ago
  In the 2 1/2 years he worked for us, we had a total of two issues. First time it was a storage array went down, and our regular DBAs were having difficulty bringing the dataguard replica back online - Our Senior DBA resolved it within 5 minutes. Second issue was an application corruption that we got stuck into the weeds with until, once again, Our Senior DBA just stepped in, restored a backup and then rolled us forward just before corruption occurred. And no service credits, he was just an extraordinarily talented DBA - we were happy to have him set our architecture/monitoring/database deployment mechanisms. I'm guessing he worked around 100 hours for that 50K over a year, or about $500/hour, which, if you think about it, for someone at the very, very top of their Oracle (or Cisco, or Java, or Hadoop, etc..) technical game is really quite reasonable - particularly when you are only paying them when they are absolutely needed, and the rest of the time your staff DBAs can handle the day-to-day.

gaius 9y ago

Was the other company aware of this arrangement too? Just curious.

untog 9y ago
> I'm pretty sure his other manager knew that he was working two jobs

cylinder 9y ago

What happened if you did have an issue? Did you mandate service credits into the contract?

ghshephard 9y ago
In the 2 1/2 years he worked for us, we had a total of two issues. First time it was a storage array went down, and our regular DBAs were having difficulty bringing the dataguard replica back online - Our Senior DBA resolved it within 5 minutes. Second issue was an application corruption that we got stuck into the weeds with until, once again, Our Senior DBA just stepped in, restored a backup and then rolled us forward just before corruption occurred. And no service credits, he was just an extraordinarily talented DBA - we were happy to have him set our architecture/monitoring/database deployment mechanisms. I'm guessing he worked around 100 hours for that 50K over a year, or about $500/hour, which, if you think about it, for someone at the very, very top of their Oracle (or Cisco, or Java, or Hadoop, etc..) technical game is really quite reasonable - particularly when you are only paying them when they are absolutely needed, and the rest of the time your staff DBAs can handle the day-to-day.