“How did you learn so much stuff about Oracle?”

In LinkedIn, a new connection asked me a very nice question. He asked, “I know this might sound stupid, but how did you learn so much stuff about Oracle. :)”

Good one. I like the presumption that I know a lot of stuff about Oracle. I suppose that I do, at least about some some aspects of it, although I often feel like I don’t know enough. It occurred to me that answering publicly might also be helpful to anyone trying to figure out how to prepare for a career. Here’s my answer.

I took a job with the young consulting division of Oracle Corporation in September 1989, about two weeks after the very first time I had heard the word “Oracle” used as the name of a company. My background had been mathematics and computer science in school. I had two post-graduate degrees: a Master of Science Computer Science with a focus on language design and compilers, and a Master of Business Administration with a focus in finance.

My first “career job” was as a software engineer, which I started before the MBA. I designed languages and wrote compilers to implement those languages. Yes, people actually pay good money for that, and it’s possibly still the most fun I’ve ever had at work. I wrote software in C, lex, and yacc, and I taught my colleagues how to do it, too. In particular, I spent a lot of time teaching my colleagues how to make their C code faster and more portable (so it would run on more computers than just the one on which you wrote it).

Even though I loved my job, I didn’t see a lot of future in it. At least not in Colorado Springs in the late 1980s. So I took a year off to get the MBA at SMU in Dallas. I went for the MBA because I thought I needed to learn more about money and business. It was the most difficult academic year of my life, because I was not particularly connected to or even interested in most of the subject matter. I hated a lot of my classes, which made it difficult to do as well as I had been accustomed. But I kept grinding away, and finished my degree in the year it was supposed to take. Of course I learned many, many things that year that have been vital to my career.

A couple of weeks after I got my MBA, I went to work for Oracle in Dallas, with a salary that was 168% of what it had been as a compiler designer. My job was to visit Oracle customers and help them with their problems.

It took a while for me to get into a good rhythm at Oracle. My boss was sending me to these local customers that were having problems with the Oracle Financial Applications (the “Finapps,” as we usually called them, which would many years later become the E-Business Suite) on version 6.0.26 of the ORACLE database (it was all caps back then). At first, I couldn’t help them near as much as I had wanted to. It was frustrating.

That actually became my rhythm: week after week, I visited these people who were having horrific problems with ORACLE and the Finapps. The database in 1990, although it had some pretty big bugs, was still pretty good. It was the applications that caused most of the problems I saw. There were a lot of problems, both with the software and with how it was sold. My job was to fix the problems. Some of those problems were technical. Many were not.

A lot of the problems were performance; problems of the software running “too slowly.” I found those problems particularly interesting. For those, I had some experience and tools at my disposal. I knew a good bit about operating systems and compilers and profilers and linkers and debuggers and all that, and so learning about Oracle indexes and rollback segments (two good examples, continual sources of customer frustration) wasn’t that scary of a step for me.

I hadn’t learned anything about Oracle or relational databases in school, I learned about how the database worked at Oracle by reading the documentation, beginning with the excellent Oracle^® Database Concepts. Oracle sped me along a bit with a couple of the standard DBA courses.

My real learning came from being in the field. The problems my customers had were immediately interesting by virtue of being important. The resources available to me for solving such problems back in the early 1990s were really just books, email, and the telephone. The Internet didn’t exist yet. (Can you imagine?) The Oracle books available back then, for the most part, were absolutely horrible. Just garbage. Just about the only thing they were good for was creating problems that you could bill lots of consulting hours to fix. The only thing that was left was email and the telephone.

The problem with email and telephones, however, is that there has to be someone on the other end. Fortunately, I had that. The people on the other end of my email and phone calls were my saviors and heroes. In my early Oracle years, those saviors and heroes included people like Darryl Presley, Laurel Jamtgaard, Tom Kemp, Charlene Feldkamp, David Ensor, Willis Ranney, Lyn Pratt, Lawrence To, Roderick Mañalac, Greg Doherty, Juan Loaiza, Bill Bridge, Brom Mahbod, Alex Ho, Jonathan Klein, Graham Wood, Mark Farnham (who didn’t even work for Oracle, but who could cheerfully introduce me to anyone I needed), Anjo Kolk, and Mogens Nørgaard. I could never repay these people, and many more, for what they did for me. ...In some cases, at all hours of the night.

So, how did I learn so much stuff about Oracle? It started by immersing myself into a universe where every working day I had to solve somebody’s real Oracle problems. Uncomfortable, but effective. I survived because I was persistent and because I had a great company behind me, filled with spectacularly intelligent people who loved helping each other. Could I have done that on my own, today, with the advent of the Internet and lots and lots of great and reliable books out there to draw upon? I doubt it. I sincerely do. But maybe if I were young again...

I tell my children, there’s only one place where money comes from: other people. Money comes only from other people. So many things in life are that way.

I’m a natural introvert. I naturally withdraw from group interactions whenever I don’t feel like I’m helping other people. Thankfully, my work and my family draw me out into the world. If you put me into a situation where I need to solve a technical problem that I can’t solve by myself, then I’ll seek help from the wonderful friends I’ve made.

I can never pay it back, but I can try to pay it forward.

(Oddly, as I’m writing this, I realize that I don’t take the same healthy approach to solving business problems. Perhaps it’s because I naturally assume that my friends would have fun helping solve a technical problem, but that solving a business problem would not be fun and therefore I would be imposing upon them if I were to ask for help solving one. I need to work on that.)

So, to my new LinkedIn friend, here’s my advice. Here’s what worked for me:

• Educate yourself. Read, study, experiment. Educate yourself especially well in the fundamentals. So many people don’t. Being fantastic at the fundamentals is a competitive advantage, no matter what you do. If it’s Oracle you’re interested in learning about, that’s software, so learn about software: about operating systems, and C, and linkers, and profilers, and debuggers, .... Read the Oracle Database Concepts guide and all the other free Oracle documentation. Read every book there is by Tom Kyte and Christian Antognini and Jonathan Lewis and Lex de Haan and Toon Koppelaars and Tanel Põder and Kerry Osborne and Karen Morton and James Morle all the other great authors out there today. And read their blogs.
• Find a way to hook yourself into a network of people that are willing and able to help you. You can do that online these days. You can earn your way into a community by doing things like asking thoughtful questions, treating people respectfully (even the ones who don’t treat you respectfully), and finding ways to teach others what you’ve learned. Write. Write what you know, for other people to use and improve. And for God’s sake, if you don’t know something, don’t act like you do. That just makes everyone think you’re an asshole, which isn’t helpful.
• Immerse yourself into some real problems. Read Scuttle Your Ships Before Advancing if you don’t understand why. You can solve real problems online these days, too (e.g., StackExchange and even Oracle.com), although I think that it’s better to work on real live problems at real live customer sites. Stick with it. Fix things. Help people.

Help people.

That’s my advice.