How good is a career as a Database Administrator?

Which has best career growth, pay and job consistency: a Java developer or a database administrator?

• Answer:

  I worked for a product based company in India for a short span of just 1yr, and my opinion may not be reflecting that of experts. Though I would like to point out my experiences from my limited exposure. I think being a DB administrator or Java dev has no difference in terms of career growth or pay. Companies usually reward by individual's performance irrespective of role, as long as he brings value. The main difference is their role in the company and may be the higher availability of java dev over DB admins in the http://market.As a result, the java developers were being replaced easily often and the training to new developer were being completed pretty faster. But DB admins can be replaced only by experienced http://professionals.So company was trying to retain their existing limited talent pool. Though DB administrator were less in number they were like powerful gatekeepers, preventing data layers becoming dirty because of some careless build push from Java / DB developers. They were having crucial role of maintaining data integrity/ availability across all applications environment. Though I felt their work to be little bit monotonous and not as playful as of frontend or middleware development, they literally controlled every developers as they are the ones who can grant access and control privileges to testing and production environments. My company builds big enterprise product with middleware implementation in Java . We have an army of Java developers who formed majority and database administrators were only about 2 percent