I work with a few former-Oracle DBAs in a PostgreSQL-flavored consultancy now and they are aces. All the root-cause analysis and organization skills transfer handily.
Postgres is functionally and conceptually extremely similar to Oracle. There are a few oddities (in particular, oracle's "nulls are never in indexes" is kinda weird) but the redo log is similar to the WAL, etc. In most cases, similar approaches will perform similarly and experience pretty much transfers over with a few months of experience.
I like things that work, and I like making things that work. Coding has been a thing I do when I need to, but using the skill to investigate existing code has been the dominant practice.
Every time I reach a goal I move the cheese. I think I'm still getting better. But I'm also realizing the potential to pursue previously unknown goals. It is part of an ongoing discovery process that is not limited to engineering.
If I had a lot more money, I would probably pursue my goals differently but I don't think I would stop pursuing them.
The 5 or 10 years experience they might have is pretty thin unless they have had extremely good mentoring. It takes more than a senior project and a few years as a junior dev to be worth much. I consider junior devs incubation projects. Some of them turn out nicely.
But many people think they're worth that. I don't think there is an intrinsic "worth" for each developer, demand is high, supply is low, that's why salaries are high.
Well, I believe that as humans they are worth enough to eat, live, and enjoy life, at the very least, but from a surviving-in-capitalism perspective they can't pull their weight for a while in most cases. I'm not arguing against hiring and paying juniors a living wage, just noting that it takes a while and some diverse experience to get most of them over the hump, so to speak.
I think a big part of this topic discussion is that there's a LOT of value in those- that many disagreements are simply down to having a different understanding about context and facts, and that giving the other person the benefit of the doubt can help people navigate those. It actually seems like one of the most relevant cases to me.
And agreed about the nature of many disagreements coming down to context and facts. My comment is aimed at people who seem to insist that other posters don't understand their context or have all the facts, when they actually do and yet continue to disagree.
I would defer to the background checks the U.S. military and federal government is doing in consideration of selling those Baltic states a lot of weapons. They will definitely do a better job that I ever can.
