How can my mom downshift as a SQL developer?

Universities use a lot of OracleSQL (almost all of them), are generally very accepting of older workers and have a working environment that is friendly to aging workers. The salaries aren't excellent but the comfort is high.

I was primarily a SQL Server dev and worked in an analytics department supporting homedepot.com call centers. I personally did about half and half application work in C# and the kind of query writing/analysis/optimization you're talking about. It was stable, paid okay, and I was working with a good team (which can be a crapshoot obviously).

I'd personally look for stuff like that out of focused tech companies.

Otherwise I think meetups are a fantastic idea, especially when it comes to greasing the wheels around whatever trendy interview practices are going on that week and being able to personalize the context around wanting to stick with Oracle.

Just off-the-top spit-balling, but things like workforce management, analytics, etc are the kinds of things I'd start with.

I also did project based consulting on small teams for about five years and Oracle is all over the place in non-tech industry, so I wouldn't despair on that front. I'm not sure what the market is for that kind of job, but it's so fundamentally woven into the fabric of a lot of F500 and similar companies that it's not going away soon--even if some of them would prefer it to.

Writing from a throwaway account to avoid outing myself...

I work here [1]. We have a QA opening in Chicago that is heavy on SQL. Pay would not be great, but the benefits are amazing. She would have no shortage of work, and of things to learn, but it wouldn't be the kind of competitive stressful situation that you describe. It's a place that really cares about work-life balance.

If you think she would consider QA-type work, have her take a look:

[1] https://www.crsp.org/about-us/careers/

https://usds.gov/apply (not tour of duty roles in DC, remote analyst or 18F)

https://www.usajobs.gov/

Slower pace but remote available and very much in demand. Should carry your Mom through to retirement. Hope it helps.

Banks have a lot of data analyst type jobs that could be good for this. They require a knowledge of SQL to generate reports but do not fall squarely under IT and so would rarely expect those kinds of project work.

My primary searches would be for something like Reporting Developer, Reporting Analyst, Report Writer, Business Analyst (for a very established business where most of the responsibilities are actually getting stuff out of a database).

I would be looking at small to medium businesses that have been around for awhile, many of them have "legacy" databases that nobody knows how to query, and someone conversant in SQL would have no big problem breaking down.

The breathless ones going on about their cloud migrations are ones to avoid.

Comment for the commenters - With job changing after 20 years, there is often another gorilla in the room - health insurance. Want to be floored, start looking at health insurance costs when you hit 50. See them jump when you hit 55. Get truly floored when you turn 60. This often means that older employees often have their health insurance as their biggest expense.

>> It's all fine work, but not for her, not at this stage in life.

>> She wants to find a place to be comfy and write some SQL scripts, analysis, and data modeling here and there, where she will be both happy and useful. Pay is not a priority.

Sorry but your mom is about my age (nearly 50 that is). "At this stage in life" is reserved for 30 years from now, someone has to break this to her.

Sounds like the private sector is not for her and that's fine but probably should have considered her options earlier. A teacher position doesn't pay developer money but it's also not nearly as stressful and volatile and "get paged on Thanksgiving weekend to fix some random crap".

On the other hand some people are just not cutoff for the level of workload in the private sector (not just programming, try sales or stacking shelves at Target for a change) and are just professional complainers. Someone I know, in his late 20s was stating "it's too late for me to learn something else, I'm done. finished. terminated". Pursued by his mother (now 75+) he did start a teacher's career and is now 25+ years into it with a nice salary and benefits. Of course it's not enough and he constantly complaints of kids being the worst and teaching the absolute most stressful environment one could imagine. For the record he did try to switch to a sales career, lasted two months and came back penitent.

So while the usual supportive shoulder is the default for your mom's case, I'd recommend investigating if there isn't some similarity to the person I know.

Show her this: https://imgur.com/a/zzUoNWC

If she can work with MS SQL and is in Los Angeles she might be interested in this position: http://jobs.metro.net/JobInformation.aspx?bno=005228-012

Focus on industries in which she has domain expertise.

Use her analytical skills to write data-backed reports. She could even do this freelance.

Overall I would suggest finding positions where SQL is used but not the entirety of the job description, otherwise she will not be able to differentiate herself from the competition.

Definitely contracting for government. The places with the most people in these roles are human services (welfare, child protective), tax, transportation and health.

Tax and human services are usually state level programs with federal money and local boots. Health often has a county component, and transportation has lots of federal money everywhere but often not a lot of IT. (They manage things as capital projects)

I don’t know about Illinois and Chicago. It’s probably worth figuring out how stuff works.

It sounds like she had a cushy job and now needs to look for a regular one. The interviews seem to all be like you mentioned. The job expectations or tasks you listed are all just normal expectations for a dev these days. Companies are increasingly forcing additonal roles and scope into a single position to save headcount.

I feel similarly. I have over 10 years in as a dev and the expectations or scope has drastically increased in that time at my company (been the same level for about 9 years now). I also specialized in dead-end tech (Neoxam and FileNet) so I'm not great at a lot of things. I narrowly avoided being sent over to a sourcing company just by lucky timing on switching teams. I have no motivation to find another job due to the shitty interview processes, my lack of expertise in relevant tech, my stressful home situation, and the fact that other companies pretty much all do the same bullshit.

I figure this is just life and I get to deal with it until I die (increasingly skeptical of retirement being a thing).

def non-tech, search specifically for positions with "Oracle SQL" in title if possible

Keep looking. A friend I know has a similar skillset and age, but is well employed. Being a SQL-only specialist is still in demand, but requires more effort and patience to find the correct fit.

Re: Point #3, this is a red flag to me, and seems like a very demanding position. (I was paged 3 times this Thanksgiving, but I work in ecommerce.)

My first job was with an older woman who was very experienced and had converted to a SSRS (MSSQL Reports) report writer a few years prior. This took her out of the daily operations, but she still used her skillsets and was a great person to learn from. Being a Maybe something like this, but for Oracle? Good luck!

Your mom sounds like half the devs at every single university IT department. Ive worked with nine different sets now, its pure SQL bespoke reporting, adding new query functionality to whatever ed-tech ERP platform they got. Its basically the same work with maybe some light dev tooling management.

Redgate Software may fit?

https://www.red-gate.com/

https://www.red-gate.com/our-company/

https://www.red-gate.com/products/

I've known about them for some years. No affiliation, but I check them out now and then out of interest.

Earlier they may have been only for MS SQL Server, but now, on a quick look, seem to have Oracle related products too.

Earlier

Planetscale might be a good fit. DM Sam Lambert on twitter.

https://twitter.com/isamlambert

The title is DBA. The role can be found at basically every Fortune 500 in the US. She may want to go to Oracle Cloud meetups if she’s been struggling to find connections through other means.

I just got a job through hired.com. It’s nice because your mom can post her resume and add a statement detailing what she’s looking for. Companies can then request an interview with her. There are similar sites such as ziprecruiter.com. Also, I’ve found that generative AI makes it much easier to learn new technologies. I would encourage her to use them. Hopefully she can retire before they put us all out of work.

Would she consider learning Apex? You can get a job developing apps in Apex. If she only wants to use SQL, I just can't see many options.

Maybe reach out to a recruiter or two that might be able to find something. She seems to have a good idea of what she wants, which would be helpful. She might want to avoid the larger firms or ones that are out of country because they're mostly interested in numbers. Smaller local firms and individuals often care about meeting people and finding a good fit.

I would look at Financial institutions’ IT groups. Lots of mediocre SQL query tinkering out there and having an experienced SQL person around can be gold. Think banks, pension funds, insurance companies, not fintech/insurtech. In Chicago, AON has a very significant presence (reinsurance/insurance broker).

I’m sorry as someone who is 50 years old and started programming as a hobbyist at 12 in assembly and professionally at 22, I have no sympathy or advice for anyone who is not willing to transition to newer tech and according to you is actively ignoring clear transition paths.

My advice is for her not to be lazy and take advantage of the opportunity to transition to some newer tech.

Context: I got my first and only job at $BigTech at 46 based on my decades of experience as a bog standard enterprise dev + two years of AWS experience at a startup as a (full time) consultant working in the Professional Services Department. I didn’t open the AWS console and didn’t know anything about “cloud” until I was 44.

When I got Amazoned three years later I was able to find a job in three weeks working full time at another consulting company where I am leading “Application modernization” initiatives (cloud + app dev).

If she isn’t at “a stage in life” where she can retire and she hasn’t gotten over her addiction to food and shelter, if she wants to stay in the industry, she has to evolve.

Look at her state, county, city government jobs. These tend to have your traditional DBA, data analyst, report writer types of roles. Only problem would be that openings aren’t always available as people in those roles tend to stay in them for the longer haul.

She already was comfy. I'm 51 and I've never actually even heard of a job where you ONLY had to know a specific dialect of SQL. Also, you would think that mere intellectual curiosity would have taken her at least somewhat "abroad" in the knowledge sense, but I see no evidence of that, which means she was basically a corporate mercenary for 20 years who phoned it in. (Note: I've mostly worked for startups, so my standards and expectations about "job interestingness" and "job expectations" and "necessary intrinsic motivation" are possibly entirely different.)

She needs to find a giant corporation where she can live out her pre-retirement days in Storage Room B, only writing very specific SQL queries for Oracle, IMHO.

Data migration is not that hard, so the fact that she's balking at even step 1 says a lot to me.

Get a job in a bank or a telco

Check for open roles in her state government. They're typically big Oracle customers and pace is very very slow.

Source: my mom works for her state government.

I send many good vibes. I wish her new place calls her today to use her awesome skills! Happy Gracias Day! ;)

You don't generally downshift. You should feel lucky she works in an industry where that's somewhat viable with a paycut.

> ..she is now given responsibilities and workloads that are much more suited for a young, ambitious, competitive dev who wants a promotion.

This is the sort of thing that ChatGPT is really good at. It will not do all of her work. But it will be a big help in getting direction, answering technical questions etc.

I am quite old myself. Over 50. I use ChatGPT everyday to learn new things or solve issue when I get stuck. It has increased my productivity several fold.

I would look for oracle customers in your area. Most would love to hire an oracle employee.

Hedge fund, data analysis/BI, any marketing department of any DTC company (soap, food, etc.) or any research group located in and/or around DC. Tons upon tons of jobs are basically SQL.

For those that don't know, you can ingest damn near any file format with columnar data via SQL. You don't have to write some Python script (although it helps.)

I'm just here to ask that you post a followup when she finds that next job!

I follow DBA jobs on Glassdoor and there are Oracle DBA openings every week.

Utility companies

Honestly, sounds like every job I have ever had. Maybe she should sharpen her skills and stay relevant?

Honestly, she sounds like a classic Oracle DBA and should look for jobs that have that as the title.

Are you Little Bobby Tables?

https://xkcd.com/327/

Do it for/with her. Nice way to spend time together.

You need to look objectively at her skill set and desires. She has a legacy skillset on an unpopular technology, and doesn't want to grow away from it. That's fine, but it's not very marketable.

Ask yourself, who would find enough value in this skillset and constraints to pay for it? That's who you need to target.

My guess: It's going to be largely non-tech and traditional companies, probably. You're looking for banks, or government contractors. Places that run Oracle and are willing to pay for someone familiar with it and not interested in much else.