onwards and upwards
After over five varied and enjoyable years working for Siebel (and then Oracle) in Expert Services, I am changing jobs. However, I will continue to work for Oracle as part of the group responsible for 'Social CRM'.
Although this was a internal transfer, my interview process was quite unusual. Instead of being forced to massage my CV into Microsoft Word format and send an email attachment to a faceless recruitment agency, I was able to publish my CV using Google Docs and the whole interview process was conducted by telephone.
A colleague had already thoughtfully pointed my prospective manager to a blog entry that was loosely relevant and he also was keen to review more technical oriented content on my Siebel related blog.
As an aside, you can only imagine the feelings and thoughts that flooded into my brain when my colleague uttered the immortal words: 'Hey Andy, I've given your <prospective new manager> a pointer to a couple of articles on your blog.'
The role will mean a few changes for me:
- I will now revert to having difficulty explaining to friends and relatives what I actually do.
- I will probably spend less time in airport lounges and more time with my family. Norma has already expressed grave reservations about this element of my career change.
- My manager will be in a different continent and timezone.
- I will be contributing to a corporate blog for the first time which will necessitate a slight shift in subject matter, terminology and slightly less of my dry, cynical, off the wall, British sense of humour although I do intend to maintain this personal blog.
I am currently tidying up a few loose ends in Expert Services and embarking on a emotional, sell-out, European farewell tour to all my favourite Siebel customers so I won't actually be starting my new role until mid-October but it will be an exciting change for me and I'm really looking forward to it.
UKOUG agenda
Monday 3 December Get up very early and drive to Birmingham. 09:40-10:30 '30 years at Oracle' - Tom Kyte. I own a couple of Kyte's excellent books and various sources report he is an excellent speaker. 10:40-11:00 Visit a few stands. A quick game of 'spot the colleague' and ask 27 different companies 'How can XYZ help me grow my business ?' 11:15-12:00 'Siebel Keynote' - David Mills. Possible sales and marketing fluff alert. Need to sit at the back adjacent to an aisle to allow a potential rapid escape to 'Oracle RAC versus Oracle Data Guard - which should I use for Disaster Recovery and which should I use for High Availability ?'. 12:25-13:20 'Under the Covers of Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition Plus' - Mick Bull/Lisa Dobson. I would like to learn more about Oracle's Business Intelligence tools. Plus I have an innate weakness for presentations titled 'Under The Covers...' 13:15-14:15 'TimesTen: Anatomy of an In-Memory Database' - Chris Jenkins (Oracle). Curious to hear more about this technology. 14:15-15:15 'Remote Hand Held SFA solutions need housekeeping - Ian Keleher/Nicola Burrows (Gallaher). A verbose and hardly compelling title but I have worked with this customer so I might get a mention on the Credits slide. 15:20-16:25 'Oracle 10g: RAC Tuning Tips' - Joel Goodman 16:45-17:30 'Siebel Marketing and Marketing Analytics' - Ben Wales 17:35-18:35 '11g new features for DBAs' - Tom Kyte. This has better be worth it. I am missing 'Siebel Networking', free beer and prawn volavons for this ! Back to hotel to dump marketing literature, USB memory sticks and complimentary gifts from Quest Software. Shower, brush teeth, apply deodorant and slip into something more comfortable. Head over to the Pitcher and Piano to gatecrash the Oracle bloggers meetup.membership form for BAAG
I own up. It's a fair cop. It is 27 years and 5 months since my last confession. Since then, I have sinned, Holy Father. In fact, I have committed an absolutely heinous crime. Please forgive me for I have submitted multiple random guesses. May the high priests (and priestesses) of the BAAG movement, please have mercy on my wretched soul. Recently, I have been guilty of supporting and even proposing a multitude of 'any guesses', all of which were proposed as possible solutions to solve a critical system problem on a production system:- I failed to cough and splutter in an effort to stifle my laughter when a manager suggested that 500 European users adopted shift working to clear the backlog.
- I didn't shout down a ludicrous proposal to reboot the Siebel Enterprise every 4 hours in order to maintain some level of service.
- I wrote on a whiteboard that consideration should be given to reinstating the previous version of the application even though this in itself was risky, time-consuming and unlikely to address the root cause.
- I even proposed patching to Oracle 10.2.0.3 with no supporting evidence whatsoever.
- I shuffled nervously and blushed when the customer asked 'Who do we escalate to when you fail to fix this problem ?'
- I watched in silence as the SAN man was stood against a wall and pelted with questions as senior management all pointed fingers in his direction.
- I failed to stand up for righteousness and technical purity as runaway, rogue sessions were maliciously and arbitrarily terminated by an Oracle DBA.
- I failed to suggest running a trivial SQL to determine index fragmentation and stood by as 74 indexes were needlessly reorganised.
- I watched helplessly as a systems administrator claimed the problem was 'definitely in the underlying disk I/O subsystem' simply because 8,000 operations a second were being performed.
- I failed to raise my eyes skywards and embark on a spontaneous two hour training session with a DBA who claimed the 'buffer cache hit ratio was fine' and the problems only started once users were allowed onto the system.