The Career Pivot I Almost Didn't Make
/ 4 min read
I spent ten years writing Oracle PL/SQL. I was good at it. Really good. And towards the end of that decade, that started to feel like a problem.
Not a crisis, nothing dramatic. Just a quiet realisation that the problems I used to stay late to solve had become routine. I knew the codebase, I knew the quirks of the platform, I knew what the answer was going to be before I’d finished reading the question. Expertise, it turns out, can start to feel like a ceiling.
The thing that cracked it open was a project I got pulled into for my domain knowledge. I spent most of that time watching the DevOps teams work. I don’t know exactly what clicked, maybe it was how fast they moved, or how differently they thought about problems, but I went home from those meetings genuinely curious in a way I hadn’t been in a while.
That curiosity eventually forced a decision: do I actually make the jump, or find something safer?
The safer option was a vendor tool, a gentler curve, closer to what I already knew. The other path was Java, Spring Boot, DevSecOps. I’d be starting from scratch. I’d be the junior guy in the room for a while, and I wasn’t sure how long “a while” would actually be.
A couple of people I wanted to call out helped me think through it. Both had worked with me before, which mattered. They knew what I was actually like, not just what I was saying in the conversation.
The first was someone I was working with at the time. She’d seen me figure things out before. When I was telling her about the technology gap and how daunting the Java path felt, she wasn’t particularly sympathetic, not in a dismissive way, but in the way someone is when they’re not worried. She was more confident in what I could do than I was. That alone shifted something.
She brought in a second person she thought I should talk to. He listened to both options and said something that I’ve thought about a lot since: if you go down the vendor tool route, your career becomes tied to that product. You’re only as relevant as that tool is, or the places still using it. But Java, Spring Boot, DevSecOps, that’s not a niche. That’s the world. Infinite doors, his words roughly.
I chose the harder path.
My first role was on a large platform project, a hundred-plus person team, real stakes, real pressure. The first months were humbling. Task after task, things that should have been a few days of work, took far longer than they should have. Code review after code review, comments to address, changes to make, back and forth until I’d lost track of what version I was on. It wasn’t one bad task. It was that pattern repeating across most of what I touched early on. Different cases, same flavour. This was the gap, right in front of me, every day.
But I was still contributing, and the gap was slowly closing in ways I could actually measure.
I went from developer to lead developer, and kept going from there.
The honest version is: I got lucky that the right people were around when I was making the decision. I got lucky that there was space to be slow for a while. And I did the unglamorous thing of sitting with discomfort long enough for it to stop feeling quite so uncomfortable.
The ten years of PL/SQL weren’t wasted. The domain knowledge, the way I think about data and systems, that’s still in there. It just lives in a different context now.
If I’d stayed comfortable, I’d still be the expert. I’m not sure that would have been enough.