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To: Pink Minion who wrote (22092)	12/12/1998 1:49:00 AM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 24154

B - These people made 70K+ on the east coast. Especially NYC - there are no programmers too incompetent to be hired. I was involved with CSFB on a credit clearing system a few years ago. The problems were deep in the query processing (it was a Sybase system) and most of the fixes involved determining why optimizations worked in some cases and failed in others (for example the optimizer would ignore a clustered index when it was easy to show that the query reduced in a tenth of the reads if that index was used). Solutions involved hand-tuning queries and forcing index use in some cases. Midway through, one of the body shops CSFB was using sent around a clown who billed himself as a database consultant. He had no idea how to use even the basic tools available, couldn't read an index page, couldn't follow the internal trees. He was maybe a few steps ahead of a bright high school student who had spent a few days reading manuals for the first time. After a day or two putting up with inane suggestions about how we could waste huge amounts of machine time finding answers that could be had in 5 minutes just by looking at the way the index statistics were being built, I sent him packing. Much to my surprise, a month later I ran across him at GS - he had been hired for a salary well into six figures to head a 'tiger team' (meow!) on database performance. The suits apparently had no clue and confused activity with action. I made the claim at the time that apparently anyone who could spell SQL was qualified to do brain surgery. No accounting for taste I guess...