[NikolaNovak]

I mean, I'm in Toronto Canada, a fairly big city and market, and have an open seat for a couple of good senior Oracle DBAs pretty much constantly. The market may have reduced over decades but there's still more demand than supply. And the core DBA skills are transferable to other RDBMS as well. While I agree that some niche technologies are fleeting, it's perhaps not the best example :-)

[woooooo]

That's actually interesting! My experience is different, especially compared to the late 90s and early 00s, most people avoid Oracle if they can. But yes, its always worth having someone who's job is to think about the database if it's your lynchpin.

[kjellsbells]

Well, there's the difference. Maybe demand has collapsed for the kind of people who knew how to tune the Oracle SGA and get their laughable CLI client to behave, but the market for people who structurally understood the best ways to organize, insert and pull data back out is still solid.

Re Oracle and "big 90s names" specifically, there is a lot of it out there. Maybe it never shows up in the code interfaces HNers have to exercise in their day jobs, but the tech, for better or worse, is massively prevalent in the everyday world of transit systems and payroll and payment...ie all the unsexy parts of modern life.

[NikolaNovak]

I think it's famously said that 5% of IT is in the exciting new stuff that's on Hacker News front page, and 95% is in boring line-of-business, back office "enterprise" software that's as unglamorous as it is unavoidable :-). Even seemingly modern giants like Google or Amazon etc - check what their payroll and financial system is in the background.

And wait until I tell you about my Cobol open seats - on modern Linux on cloud VMs too! :-)