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<p>I worked in business applications for a while back in the dark ages
and back then we had Business Systems Analysts that developed
requirements that worked with the Programmer/Analysts to develop
applications software. The BSAs worked with end-users and management
to get the functional requirements and then worked with the
Programmer/Analysts to come up with a technical model that could be
implemented. For the most part, the business people didn’t really get
the technical side that well. The more common model today is where the
software engineer does a lot more of the BSA role - my opinion is that
this doesn’t work out so well most of the time.</p>
<p>I also managed an IS group in a marketing department later on. We did
pricing analysis and competitive marketing. We recieved large data
feeds from around the world and loaded it into a database to process
information requests on the data. Back then, there were quasi-english
interfaces and some of the marketing people ran their queries on their
own. Others submitted requests for information by writing out what
they wanted in English - we would then do the coding for them. One
aspect of our value added was our familiarity with the data. In any
large data feed, you typically have some amount of garbage data and we
had an AI filter for automatically converting the garbage into
something more useful or something that wouldn’t return as high a
level of bad information.</p>
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<p>Did this guy have a CS degree or an CIS degree? The CS degree is
mostly math, programming, hardware and and algorithms. The CIS degree
is a business degree with a programming concentration. The former can
probably do a better job at building an efficient solution from specs
but may not understand your business or may not have the best in
communication skills. The latter isn’t as good at software engineering
and efficiency but will be much better at understanding the business
side and should be much better in dealing with the average person.</p>
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<p>I’ve known many DBAs and Database Design Consultants and the skills
that they have include and require programming but usually not to any
sophisticated level - you can certainly design and program database
applications without any expertise in algorithms.</p>
<p>The folks that command the big bucks usually work on database systems
that require near 100% uptime and/or very large databases where
performance in transaction processing, data warehouse, backup/restore
and high throughput are important. Being able to configure hardware
and communications, hot standby, federated databases, database
clusters, etc. are important.</p>
<p>In the Boston Area, there was a lot of demand for DBAs in the 1990s.
Then jobs dried up pretty quickly as these high-paying jobs were
off-shored. I don’t know what the current state of the DBA job market
looks like today but I don’t know that I’d want to run such an
important and security-sensitive operation off-shore.</p>