Oracle Expert

I have always wondered what factor is  more important in building a good team. Staff with years of experience, or a team full of intelligent people? I hear you say, you can’t choose one way or the other, you need both. Of course, but if you have to choose, which one do you think is more important?

A lot of IT departments in financial institutions advertise their jobs with something along these lines:

 “at least 5 years of experience in Oracle, with experience working in large financial institutions”

 Staff with years of experience (especially with the tag of “have worked in other banks before”) are normally the preferred candidates. This is normal, because employers would like to have these people hit the ground running. Give them minimum training and orientation, and off they go. Don’t forget though, that naturally these experienced candidates also carry higher price tags.

 Can you take a bunch of inexperienced people, and turn them into a valuable member of staff? Two requirements are needed:

• Intelligent candidate
• Good mentoring

 Recently I spent three days remotely mentoring a bright twenty-two year old in India. She is a good 10 years younger than the average age of London staff. Her name is Smita, and she works as an outsourced junior DBA, while at the same time still pursuing her master degree in Computer Science. Over the few months I have known her, she really stands out from the crowd. She picks up mundane DBA tasks, and is enthusiastic about it, she follow things up properly and thoroughly. If she/other outsourced staff can’t fix some of the more technically challenging tasks, the senior staff in London would normally take over. Smita would “pester” me relentlessly “please tell me how you fix it!”. Or “how do you know where to look?”

The last 3 days I showed her how to perform an Oracle 10g upgrade on a database. This has been postponed for ages by the London staff because it contains an old installation of HTML DB, which needs to be upgraded to Oracle Application Express. There is a large backlog of databases to upgrade, and not enough people in the London team who know how to do it.

 So, here I was, spending hours with her through instant messaging, showing her step by step what to do. Sometimes deliberately letting her make mistakes, and later pointing out how to troubleshoot the error messages and to fix the errors.

 Three short days later (due to the time difference between UK and India ), she did it. She now joins the rank of a few people in our team who knows how to do this particular task. She painstakingly took notes as we go along. “I want to be able to do it in my sleep”, she said. She was ecstatic that she managed to do it, and I am incredibly proud of her.

 On another note, I co-own a software company Claromentis, which provides customizable information management portal and intranet software solutions. Most of the development work is done in Russia, and in the UK we concentrate on project delivery, sales and technical support. Recently we decided to expand our UK staff with customer facing developers, and went through the process of hiring. We already have an experienced development and testing team in Russia, so we decided that we would choose inexperienced candidates, as long as they show intelligence and good attitude. And being based in Brighton definitely helps, as it is a young vibrant city, a university town, so we are not short of candidates. We sieved through tons of CVs, needing to get it right. We finally made our selections. Now this is only the beginning. We will only succeed if we put the effort and time to nurture these young talents - which in itself is a challenge as the experienced Claromentis developers are as I mentioned in Russia. And I know we will.

I also believe that given the opportunity, I would love to take on the challenge to nurture young bright talented people  and teach them as much as I can about Oracle, and other things that matter to shape someone to be a caring, problem aware, customer centric Oracle professional.