A 7 year journey, my longest employment ever

It has been an amazing ride: 1st of May 2022 I have been with dbi services for exactly seven years. This is by far the longest employment in my career. When I started way back in 2015 most of my work was still around Oracle products, like the Oracle Database and Oracle Grid Infrastructure, Oracle GoldenGate and a bit of Oracle RAC, DataGuard and Exadata. I still remember the first discussions about my contract and the options to develop myself. The most important topic for me at that time was to develop the open source database business at dbi services, that was the unofficial deal.

By “unofficial” I mean that, it was not written in the contract and this brings me to one of the most important experiences I have had, and still have, at dbi services: Trust. Of course, trust is something you have to earn, but once you have it, you are free to go in any direction as long as it is related to the business. For me that meant reducing my Oracle tasks over the years and focus more and more on open source products. For this opportunity I want to say “Thank You” to my management, my colleagues and last but not least, to my team.

When I look back at how that open source business started it was a huge opportunity, but also a huge investment. Before you become visible in an open source community, you need to spend quite some time and investments until it becomes something which also gives back some money to pay the employees. I could also say it was a kind of risk. Taking that risk, investing into that is probably nothing every company is willing to do, and that brings us back to trust. Without trust you’ll loose trust of the employees and then you’re done or stuck into whatever you’re doing currently.

Today, we’re quite happy with our open source business. The most challenging task is to find qualified people in the market, or people who are willing to learn in our business. We’re still doing infrastructures, no fancy or cool application development. But without a solid infrastructure you can’t build applications that scale and perform. No matter if it is in a public Cloud, private Cloud, or in one or more data centers you own or rent.

We’re growing continuously and we need more human resources in all areas. How can we attract them? This is quite easy to answer: You want to work in a company where you are known and respected as a person, not as a number. You want to be able to develop yourself and you want to feel like being part of a family. This is, what I have always been looking for and this is exactly the reason I am still with dbi services, and probably will be for many more years.

I know this is not a technical blog post, but it needed to be said.