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DBAs are a subset of sysadmins, and the sysadmin role is being replaced by devops and offloading more and more functionality to cloud as-a-service products. Ev

DBAs are a subset of sysadmins, and the sysadmin role is being replaced by devops and offloading more and more functionality to cloud as-a-service products. Even at large companies, you'll often see databases being run by "data engineering" and SRE teams rather than pure DBA teams. This isn't just a naming difference: the background and mindset expected in these roles is engineering, not system administration. You're going to be most likely to find traditional DBA roles at companies that run a lot of legacy on-premise software: banks, defense contractors, government jobs, older large tech companies like IBM and HP, etc.

lumost 4y ago
Genuinely curious, how big is the long tail of legacy enterprise software? my understanding is that many "legacy" systems have barebones R&D teams to go along with them. More software has been written in the last 10 years than in the 20 years prior as the field has grown.
- twblalock 4y ago
  Even most FAANG companies are over 20 years old: Apple is over 40. Google, Netflix and Amazon were founded in the 90s. Facebook is the youngest one, founded in 2004, which makes it 18 years old. Within those companies, there is tons of legacy software and some of it still runs some of their most important systems, despite large sustained investments in modernization. If FAANG is that way, imagine what it's like at large banks or defense contractors which don't have a strong emphasis on modernization in their internal software engineering cultures.
  - lumost 4y ago
    I know of at least one FAANG retiring the DBA role. While there are huge piles of legacy code, I wouldn't bet on legacy maintenance being a good ticket at a FAANG.
throwaway787544 4y ago
"DevOps" roles are sysadmin roles. The role name changed but the job is identical. I've been doing this for two decades. My title changed but nothing else did. We went from programming Puppet and building packages to programming Terraform and building containers. Actually I end up pointing out bugs to the software developers now because they're worse than developers 20 years ago.

lumost 4y ago

Genuinely curious, how big is the long tail of legacy enterprise software? my understanding is that many "legacy" systems have barebones R&D teams to go along with them. More software has been written in the last 10 years than in the 20 years prior as the field has grown.

twblalock 4y ago
Even most FAANG companies are over 20 years old: Apple is over 40. Google, Netflix and Amazon were founded in the 90s. Facebook is the youngest one, founded in 2004, which makes it 18 years old. Within those companies, there is tons of legacy software and some of it still runs some of their most important systems, despite large sustained investments in modernization. If FAANG is that way, imagine what it's like at large banks or defense contractors which don't have a strong emphasis on modernization in their internal software engineering cultures.
- lumost 4y ago
  I know of at least one FAANG retiring the DBA role. While there are huge piles of legacy code, I wouldn't bet on legacy maintenance being a good ticket at a FAANG.

throwaway787544 4y ago

"DevOps" roles are sysadmin roles. The role name changed but the job is identical. I've been doing this for two decades. My title changed but nothing else did. We went from programming Puppet and building packages to programming Terraform and building containers. Actually I end up pointing out bugs to the software developers now because they're worse than developers 20 years ago.