Getting into Web-based database geek jobs: this process sucks!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’m a FileMaker geek. I can do anything with FileMaker. I can create a database that is hosted OVER YONDER that, when opened HERE, causes your non-FileMaker-generated appointment-reminder app that you see over THERE, in your home office, to display info entered by your supervisor who works HERE in this FileMaker-centric office.

It’s one language among many, somewhat esoteric (insofar as it persists and holds its own as more or less the sole remaining standing db architecture that is not SQL native; and insofar as all the others have no modern GUI and require a second interface layer to be written to publish the db in any kind of user-friendly presentation), perhaps not the current up-and-coming thing such that developers who do that get immediately hired.

I saw the proverbial writing on the wall: YOU NEED TO HAVE MORE MAINSTREAM DATABASE SKILLS. And I asked around, here (SDMB) and there and everywhere and from a wide variety of sources got the advice that I should definitely pick up MySQL plus PHP and with those skills I could get hired for a helluva lot more jobs.

Did that. Learned those.

Turns out: the jobs available for a person who knows MySQL + PhP generally also want the applicant to know:

• JavaScript
• Java
• AJAX
• ASP
• Perl
• CSS
• .NET
• any other 3 from a list of 16+ possible additional languages I should have just learned by osmosis.
Fuck.

I hate trying to gain traction in a new job environment and having THIS MANY possible / probable technologies they think I’d just naturally have acquired along the way and I’m going :confused: huh?

Well. It’s extended my reach as an FmPro developer because I can now say I can do FileMaker + MySQL, and FileMaker + PhP, and in a rudimentary way MySQL + PhP. So not a waste of my time. But it isn’t getting me out of the barrio if you see what I mean…

2

A lot of those job applications are put out by people who know jack shit about what exactly needs to be done, or even what those terms mean.

My (small) company works with a (small) SEO company that needed a Web person for small projects. They sent over their job advertisement for me to look over and flat out said “because we don’t know what most of these terms mean.” Sure enough they wanted all of the skills you listed, in one person.

I flat out told them that NO ONE is proficient in all of those technologies. There’s just not enough time in the day to learn them all, nor is there a need. If they got a hit from that ad, the person would most likely be lying. Hell, between my partner and I we don’t know all of that stuff and we are highly paid. No way a $20/hr contractor will know all that shit.

So, steer clear of ads like that because you’ll just end up being the “go to guy” for some shithook company that doesn’t know what the hell they need, or don’t understand what they’re selling to the client. You’re much better off pimping out your services as a strict MySQL/PHP contractor.

Do learn HTML, CSS and JavaScript, tho. They come with the territory (Web sites). You don’t have to be a guru at them, but learn them enough to not feel like a schmuck when you list them on your resume.

3

I don’t see why you’d need to know both PhP and ASP. Or both Perl and Dot Net. Just go with ASP and VBScript, or else Dot Net all by itself (that’s ASPX). You can get plenty of jobs. (I would think.)

4

No real need for HTML or CSS unless you’re designing as well. Very little JS.

5

SQL is easy. And MySQL isn’t much different from MS SQl Server or Oracle. I’m ready to take on any of the above (as a novice, of course).

PhP is easy as it goes but it’s extensible. I can write some basic PHP that can communicate with MySQL (libraries are included) and also PHP that can communicate directly with FileMaker Pro (via an “include” statement plus a basic library of PHP commands that FmPro knows & responds to; they, also, are pretty basic). Again, as a novice. I haven’t actually DONE this PhP stuff for anyone in a professional setting.

I’ve stolen some JavaScript and managed to modify some of it to meet my needs. I could not write one line of it from scratch.

I sort of, kind of, ever so vaguely know what .NET, AJAX, and Perl are. I could not tell them from vbasic or AppleScript or HyperCard programming command language though.

I know what CSS is. I’ve never seen it close up. I don’t know how to write it. My HTML skills predate “frames”. I can make a text string bold and I can make a hyperlink that works. Beyond that I’m lost in HTML. CSS is totally after my time.

Thanks for the feedback. Based on what you folks are saying, they are just being wishful HR thinkers, hoping someout out there knows all that shit and will apply. And that mostly that isn’t too likely and I should apply anyway?

6

Maybe as part of the interview, you will get past the HR wishful thinkers and get to talk with the person you will be reporting to and working for. That person should have a better grasp. If they really expect you to know everything on that list, it might mean they have no one at all, and you will be “it” for everything. In that case, your paycheck better be obscenely huge.

I’m in the gubmint, and I’ve seen some stupid things there too. One time it was a job “advertisement” for a PhD (with experience) and the offered pay grade was GS-7. Yeah, right.

So talk to them, see what the real deal is, and keep your options open.

7

I know HTML and CSS pretty well. But I don’t know any other web technologies: AJAX, Flash, Javascript, PHP, CGI, etc.

So I can’t really do anything useful anymore; all my skills are too basic to really achieve anything beyond only the most mundane, though I can make it look pretty.

Story of my life. I know some things, but not enough to really get anywhere.

8

If you really want to focus primarily on the database side, the I’d recommend focusing on SQL Server or Oracle. It’s not to say that there are no pure MySQL jobs, just that in many of them, it’s more of an afterthought that some dev takes over. As an example, our company uses all three platforms, but none of our pure database types are involved in MySQL, other than to sporadically fix the code that some app dev wrote less than efficiently.

In the SQL Server world, you’re likely to find that many of the jobs will expect both T-SQL proficiency as well as DBA type skills, although there are plenty of jobs where one or the other is good enough. In the Oracle world, there is still more of a dividing line in many shops, so you could focus on being a PL/SQL dev or DBA, but don’t necessarily have to have both.

9

You need to ask what the job is. If it’s creating new pages for the city Web site and the city Web site is all PHP with MySQL then all that other shit (except HTML, CSS and JS) is irrelevant. No one is going to hire an ASP.NET guy to maintain a PHP site unless they want the ASP.NET guy to re-do the site in ASP.NET. You can upgrade a PHP site using PHP until the cows come home.

Now, my area of expertise is the Web. So I don’t know what else people can do with PHP/MySQL (I consider browser-based intranets to be Web sites, cuz they are, even if they’re not on the Web). Maybe there’s more you can do with those skills, I don’t know. But at least as far as our business shows, the demand for dynamic sites is not going away, it’s increasing.

As for how much HTML, CSS and JS you need to know - even if you are working on a team and there is a designer, you still need to know the basics of how all that works. If they give you a fully-functioning HTML site and your job is to take some of their static HTML mockups and make it dynamic, you need to know which bits of HTML will need to be incorporated into your PHP.

For example, you might get an HTML representation of a table and you need to grab data from MySQL and loop through it and spit out an HTML table row for each database row. And not break the table. If the text is supposed to be red when the field is a certain value, you need to know how to make it red.

You need to know how to at least apply styles (CSS) to what you spit out in your PHP. And, there’s a 50/50 chance that the designer doesn’t know JS and expects you as “the technical guy on the team” to take care of it. If you’re going to be doing JS you’ll probably be doing DHTML, which is CSS + JS, thus the importance of knowing what you can do with CSS.

Most of my experience has been that I get a big fat PSD file from a designer that knows nothing of HTML and it’s my job to not only cut the damn thing up in Photoshop to make individual graphics, but then to also put it all back together in HTML and then go on to make it dynamic. But that’s why I make the big bucks :slight_smile: There’s plenty of real jobs out there that have dynamic Web programmers as part of a larger team where most of that is taken care of, but you will indeed be much more marketable if you are a one-stop-shop, at least when it comes to being able to build a Web site from top to bottom using your preferred technology. (which is why knowing ASP, PHP and ASP.NET is bullshit. Stick with just one.)

10

Yeah, I’m kinda in the same place. I’m not a good designer, I can make a web design but I don’t have the keen eye that actual graphic designers are. My layouts are always missing something. And I went into HTML/CSS because I didn’t want to go full-tilt into programming, I like my programming-lite. I can do junior programming duties, but it isn’t my favorite part of the job.

This wouldn’t be such a problem if I lived in a huge city, but I live in a smaller one and my job search isn’t going so well.

11

Less often, I see the same jack-of-all-trades skillsets being requested on the database side. I should be a certified FileMaker Developer. Plus I should be adept in Access. I should be an Oracle DBA and I should know MS SQL Server. I should know my way around Brio Query. And Crystal Reports. And Ruby on Rails. And EDI, to communicate with SAP and PeopleSoft, with specific EDI experience on my resume. Yeesh, what else ought I to know really well, 4D? dBase III? PostGres?

Not to mention being a brilliant wizard at the Unix command line. And able to write my own FileMaker plugins in C++. And of course multiple years of experience in Deelybopper, their industry-specific database that no one else uses.

12

I feel for you (and me). It is hard to tell what skills they really want because the lists HR puts out are impossible for one person. If they just listed what is actually required for the job, everyone would be better off.

13

You forgot FoxPro. :smiley:

14

Is it possible the HR people KNOW it’s unreasonable and are doing it to sort out the honest from the suckups, or is that my overinflated faith in humanity talking again?

15

HR people KNOW things? I have never seen any evidence of this.

16

I think that often the Person With The Real Need has a list with a bunch of “or”.

“I need someone who can cook nutritious and varied
salads or
roasts or
stews or
desserts.”

The “cook nutritious and varied” is required, the rest are a series of options as he’s looking to split the meals, not for a single person to do everything… but HR treats it as a series of “ands.” So, they ask for someone to know MSOffice and OpenOffice, when the business in question happens to use OpenOffice but they know that someone familiar with MSOffice will be able to use oO in no time flat; mySQL and Oracle and twentyotherflavorsofSQL when what the IT folks need is “someone to create and maintain a database, we don’t care which flavor he uses so long as it works.”

17

I am not hiring anyone who has less than five years experience with Windows 7

18

Wanted:

Professional football quarterback. Must have 3 years of Superbowl experience. Extensive Offensive, Defensive, and Special Teams experience required. Security clearance desired.

Salary to 31k based on experience and qualifications.

19

As someone who is in a position to know, let me assure you that that is all bullshit. I’ve put out those same sorts of job ads from time to time. Not a single person has EVER been proficient in more than two or three of the things.

Now, it IS going to matter what kind of server they have. If it’s Windows running IIS (Internet Information Services), then they don’t need PhP or Perl any more than they need a hole in the head. They’re going to need either ASP and (server side) VBScript, or else Dot Net (depending on whether they are maintaining legacy code or writing new stuff.) An Apache server, on the other hand, will have a much different set of needs. But no matter what the underlying language is, they ALL can connect in some way with MS SQL, MySQL, Oracle, or what-have-you so long as there is some layer in place within the language to communicate with the database.

For HTML, the important thing to remember about it is that it is just a container for web content. It tells servers important (and trivial) things about the client app, and that sort of thing. CSS is just for the look and feel of the page, and really has nothing to do with the content. So, you’ll use HTML to do things like pass data from page to page or to hold data in a single page, and you’ll use CSS to make it all look the way you want it to.

But your database programming itself won’t change. You’ll open a connection, read the data, and dump it out on the page. Or you’ll write the data the user has provided, pretty much the same way as you would do with desktop programming, except that the connection string is different (there is one IP address for code running on the server, but another for code running from the remote client).

The most important thing to keep in mind from a programmer’s perspective is that all web applications are stateless. In other words, your information on Page1.htm is destroyed as soon as Page2.htm loads. So you have to pass data from Page1 to Page 2, and you can do this via HTML. Newer languages, like Dot Net, make this statelessness a bit easier to handle, but of course you have to learn the language and the model it uses for web access.

All you really need to know about HTML or CSS (or even JS and other client-side code and server-side code as well) can be found at W3Schools. They even let you play with samples to test your comprehension of what they teach. And it’s all free.

So anyway, just be honest with your interviewer. Tell him you know A, B, and C, but haven’t worked with X, Y, and Z. Stress that you’re a fast learner, and that given the rudiments of the language, you can catch on quickly. I know the job market is fierce right now, so use some creativity. Offer, for example, to work at a lower salary on a probationary period for a short, fixed length of time. Make a deal that if they’re not satisfied with your work, they can let you go; otherwise, they can bump you up to full salary and benefits. Most employers would jump at such an offer. (I did a similar thing once myself.)

Good luck, man. If you go the Windows IIS route, just PM me with any questions you have that you can’t solve with the source I gave you, and I’ll try to help.

20

Wow, according to this thread I should be fighting employers off with a stick.