It's A Funny Market

Like everyone else involved in this business, I watch the job market.  It's good to stay on top of things from both a hiring perspective and as a guy who sells my services.  And it's a funny market right now…one of the oddest markets I've seen in quite a while.

My company has been in the market for sales people with some experience in selling Oracle E-Business and Oracle Business Intelligence.  It's a tough slog, especially on the U.S. West Coast.  Lots of competition for sales people.

On the other hand, two of the best solution architects I know have been looking for months with no success.  Ditto for people specializing in support or post-sale customer care.  Serious talent and few opportunities.

Apps DBAs are holding their own, but there's not as much of a rush for their services these days. But traditional DBAs appear to be doing quite well.  And applications developers, especially those using Fusion Middleware tools, seem to be finding a glut in the market place.  The latter seems especially true for those who specialize in SOA, although the ADF developers are holding their own.  And while mobile apps are a hot ticket with users, the rates and salaries for mobile developers are typically at the lower end of the pay scale.

Functional folks:  good market for folks with EBS upgrades, but a bit sparse for PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Fusion Applications.  I suspect the EBS market will also shrivel a bit as customers finish off the move from 11i to R12.1.x later this year.

Lots of Hyperion opportunities, but the Essbase market itself seems a bit dry...weird.

In short, it's a highly segmented job market in the Oracle space at this particular moment.  Some areas are up, while others are down.  As Oracle continues their evolution from a database company into a "complete stack" technology company, it's definitely causing ripples in the Oracle-related job market that we've not really seen before.  We're on uncharted ground…which makes it a funny market.