What follows are just some of the highlights from an actual job posting. I’m not including the job description, just the requirements that an applicant has to have in order to even throw their hat in the ring:
- Requires Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience.
- Experience running and maintaining a 24×7 production computing environment
- Hands-on experience driving improvements in product performance via changes in database schema, logical and physical data organization (partitioning), tuning and configuration.
- Experience implementing/maintaining database failover mechanism (mirroring, log-shipping, clustering, etc.) and perform disaster recovery exercises for mission-critical databases.
- Strong SQL/T-SQL skills with hands-on experience in successful database design, schema design, SQL performance tuning and optimization.
- Strong skills in SSRS report development and SSIS/ETL.
- Experience with maintaining and optimizing MongoDB is preferred
- Experience with AWS services is a plus.
- Experience with data profiling/metadata analysis/data modeling and relational schema design in object oriented or component based projects is a plus.
Sounds impossible, right? It wasn’t.
There was probably someone doing it.
Here’s how these job descriptions get written:
Debbie in IT starts as a developer. Over the years, she gradually takes on more duties, building reports in SSRS, a few ETL packages in SSIS. She’s proud of her work, and rightfully so, because she’s growing her skill set. She’s proactively learning on her own. She models the data, builds metadata repositories about where the data warehouse’s data is coming from.
Someone in the team builds something in MongoDB, and they quit, and Debbie has to take over the administration of the MongoDB servers.
The company comes out with a mandate that the servers can never go down, but they don’t give Debbie any money to make it happen. She duct-tapes things together as best she can, putting in a cluster and log shipping, and tries her hardest to make sure it stays online.
Then one day, the company says, “Let’s move everything to the cloud. Debbie, you’ve been able to get things done – you’re in charge.” Debbie rolls up her sleeves, works late nights and long weekends, and makes it happen.
Eventually, Debbie becomes tired of burning the candle at both ends. She mentions to a friend of hers that she’s burned out, and her friend says, “Whoa, come on over here and join me at Acme. We’ll take much better care of you. You won’t have to spread yourself so thin, and you can focus on the parts of the job you really love.” She turns in her two weeks’ notice.
And now her old boss says, “Well, we’ll just write up a job description for what Debbie used to do.”
Except nobody wants that job.
The whole reason Debbie left is because that job sucks.
Don’t let those requirements scare you off,
but be open about your fears.
If you see a job like that, and you’re too intimidated by the list of “requirements,” throw your hat in the ring anyway. The company probably isn’t going to find someone who has all of those skills – at least, not at the rate they’re likely to pay. Be honest with them and say, “Here are the parts of those requirements that I already have, but here are the parts I don’t. Also, is this really one job, or is this maybe two jobs? Is there someone else on staff who can help back me up on parts of these, or am I maybe the backup?”
Sometimes when companies say “requirements,” what they really mean is nice-to-haves – only they don’t know that yet.
Just make sure you ask one crucial question when you’re interviewing for the position: “Is this a new position, or am I replacing someone who left? And if I’m replacing a former person, can you tell me a little about why they’re no longer here? That job description reads like it might be a cause for burnout, and I just want to make sure I don’t get myself stretched too thin. After all, you wouldn’t want me to get burned out and leave too – what can we do to make sure I’m not stretched too thin?”
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