Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

I haven’t written anything in my blog for a few months now, and if you have been following me for a long time you know that’s quite unusual. However, there is a good reason for this, which I’m going to explain here.

If you follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn, you probably saw that we’ve decided to move back to Israel after 7 wonderful years in Canada, but that’s not the only change in my life. There is a career shift as well.

Personal Decisions

We moved to Canada about 7 years ago as my wife started her PhD, and we knew that we would be at a decision fork when she finishes. These 7 years were really great and we love Canada. So why did we decide to move back? It’s a complex question and I’m not going to go into all the details of pros and cons of each country. I’ll just say that every country has its good things and not-so-good things, there is no perfect. The main reason for us to move back was the family. We left a large family behind and COVID showed us how distant we were and that it’s not trivial to just hop on a plane and come (even before COVID it took us about 20 hours to get from Vancouver to Israel).

We moved back at the beginning of September and the couple of months before and since were a bit crazy. There is a lot of bureaucracy to take care of, we needed to find a place to live, many things to buy for the new place, and much more. On top of that, Israel is much more “fast paced” than Vancouver, so it takes time to get use to it. There are also the kids, who need to start school in the new place and get used to the very different culture. So we are quite busy.

Professional Decisions

This is something that I haven’t shared yet. In the last couple of years I felt like I’ve had enough of contracting and consulting. This is something I’ve been doing for basically my entire career (about 20 years), as I’ve always worked for professional services companies. There is a huge benefit for this type of career and I think I’ve talked about it in the past. Working on a project basis for different companies all the time gives a lot of experience in many technologies, many different systems, and exposes you to different work methods. There are always challenges and tricky situations and there is also an incentive to promote yourself at conferences and online (which I love). But, there is a but… It can be exhausting at times, you don’t always feel part of the team, it’s hard to climb the management ladder, and more (I actually talked about it with Jim on our podcast Beyond Tech Skills, when we talked about going independent in episode 28 and episode 29).

Just to add another point, in 2008, when I decided to leave the company I was working for, I thought I wanted to leave the consulting/contracting type of work. So I checked a few options, but none was interesting enough. The one that was interesting happened to be a professional services company (again), which I joined as a partner and manager (but still continued contracting and consulting myself).

So back to 2022, with the move back to Israel I thought maybe this is the time to make this change. I had the opportunity to go back to a professional services company, but I wanted to check other options as well. The problem with other options in the past was that I never found the opportunity that was “worth” the change. Being a contractor/consultant is challenging, different with every project, and also more flexible (especially in Canada, where I was self-employed). This means that a “regular” position must be really challenging/interesting and “worth” it (personally and professionally) for me to accept it. And until now I didn’t really get such an offer (one came really close, but eventually didn’t work out).

With the move back to Israel I started checking around with people from my network to see if such an opportunity exists, and I managed to find it! A very interesting and challenging company, not small (I’m not in a stage where I can join a startup and work in startup-mode), but not a huge corporation either. A company with lots of data challenges and the position is the company’s database team leader. Definitely something I’d like to do. I’m not revealing the company name yet (you’ll see it when I start), but I’m sure at least some of you have heard about it.

What This Means Professionally

There are many changes with me taking this position. First, I’ve managed people before, but only teams of consultants. Here I’m going to manage an organic team of DBAs. I think I can write an entire blog post on how these are different, but to make it short, managing consultants is managing the people, their professional side, and making sure they feel part of the team. However, all of the planning, internal company decisions, daily tasks, and daily management in general was done by the client they worked for and not me. I’ll need to learn how to do this effectively and be part of an entire company helping it grow and meet its goals.

Another big thing is that my entire career was focused on Oracle database. This company doesn’t work with Oracle database at all! They use mainly MySQL, some PostgreSQL, and a little bit of different NoSQL databases. I will need to learn all of these and I can’t wait to do so.

Did I already say challenging?

What It Means Community-Wise

Anyone who knows me knows I love the community. Being an Oracle ACE Director is part of it, but I also write a blog (this one), speak at conferences, have been part of Oracle User Groups, etc. etc.

So what now?

I’m not sure. I really love the community, so I do plan to stay part of it, but I don’t know how yet. I’m afraid I will be less active in the near future, but once I get settled with the new position, I do hope to write blog posts again (about MySQL maybe?), speak at conferences (as much as my employer will allow me), and be part of the community (MySQL is still under the Oracle umbrella, but there are also great communities for PostgreSQL and other databases).

Plans

I can’t make too many plans right now, but I do plan to be active on Twitter if you’d like to see how I’m doing. I want to write about my path into the new databases and role, and I do want to start thinking about conferences again and meeting all the people in the community that I love so much. But all of this might take some time.

In the meantime, if you want to reach out and keep in touch, you can always find me on Linkedin or Twitter (my DMs are open).