Database Programmer
Career review from a person working in the job
How I Got The Job
My Education: Certificate from trade school
My Prior Experience: none
My Job Profile
My Company: I work at a college as a database programmer. In an OIT office with many types of technical people. Our office consists of a technical support group, network and hardware support and systems programmers.
Job/Career Overview: My responsibilities are to create/maintain reports and processes for the users to do their daily jobs. My users are from the different offices within the college. I do this within three different systems that our users use. The projects vary in size depending on the need and priority.
Many times I will have to drop a project to work on something with higher priority. Juggling projects is very common.
The programming I do is mainly with Unix Basic, Lotus Notes and report writing software. It is not the type of programming I started with which was Assembler and COBOL. (showing my age). The logic is the same, which I have found over the years is the most important part of a programmer's job. Systems change in this business and as long as you are able to think logically, you are able to program in any language. That is the beauty of programming, you are always learning new things.
Love It? Hate It?
I rate this career 8 out of 10.
What I Love or Hate
The best thing about my job is that it is always changing. My responsibilities are pretty much the same, but because it is a technical job and technology is always changing it isn't ever boring.
The worst part of my job is that we don't always have the time to learn the new technology before it is being used, so we have to learn as we go, which can be very frustrating. We also don't have enough programmers and the work load is high. Trying to get work done in a timely manner doesn't always work out.
My Career Tips
You need to be flexible. You need to be able to work well on your own or with a group. In the OIT environment you work with many types of people and you need to be understanding of that.
As a programmer analyst you work closely with the users who many times do not understand the technical world, so you need to be patient with them.
