Well, I'll tell you what I found during my interview, name of the institution intentionally left out. 1- Nice small institution (somewhere between 10K and 20K students). 2- Nice location, straight up NH route 113 from my home (that can be really enjoyable in the fall and spring, bit of a problem in the winter but that's what a 4X4 is for) 3- Salary along the lines for NH ( about 1/3 rd of my current at the time) 4- Benefits similar to industry (health and dental, 2 weeks vacation to start, long term disability, 401K match similar to industry, no pension, etc.....) 5- reduced tuition for self and direct family members (something like 25%) 6- Single DBA for the entire institution, required to handle Oracle, DB2, and Sql*Server (Production, development, testing, and student play areas) 7- Did your own OS maintenance as well, mostly Windoze. 8- 24x7 support with pager and VPN 9- Expected to assist staff and students with DB problems, questions, etc..... Now you tell me if I made the right choice or not. Dick Goulet Senior Oracle DBA ________________________________ From: Dubovecky, Jeff [mailto:jpd40@xxxxxxxx] Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 2010 11:25 AM To: dackoc@xxxxxxxxx; jpiwowar@xxxxxxxxx Cc: cboyle@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx; Goulet, Richard; kp0773@xxxxxxxxx; Oracle-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: RE: DBA pay in university Just to follow-up on this thread, I'm also a public university employee and I agree with Carol on most of her points. Benefits such as Tuition reimbursement for self/children and retirement plan/match were big factors in my decision to work at a University even at a lesser salary. For the staff I manage, we are more like a business as well as we're responsible not only for production dba support, but also development and BI/Data Warehouse initiatives. In terms of technology, this is where I was pleasantly surprised. We utilize many different technologies within the Oracle stack (RAC, Data Guard, OEM, PeopleSoft) as well as other IT initiatives (VMWare, etc.). While maybe not considered cutting edge anymore, this was a lot more than I expected coming in.