Once again we’re running a contest to find the Exceptional DBA around the globe. I’ve been a judge the last three years, and it’s been a hard choice trying to pick from some great applications. This year the judges are Brad McGehee, Brent Ozar, Rodney Landrum and me.
Nominations are now open, and you can nominate yourself, or a colleague for the change to be named the Exceptional DBA of 2011.
Best of luck to everyone, and a few hints.
More writing is better – We don’t want to read a chapter from War and Peace, but take a few paragraphs to describe your environment with some details.
Be specific on the highlights. – Let us know what you did, why it’s important or impressive to your organization.
Be well rounded – We are looking for people that do more than their job. They teach others, they are proactive, and they make the DBA profession better for everyone.
Proofread – Have a friend or even your boss review the nomination form.
The nominations are open until June 30, so take a week or so and think about how best to present yourself.
Millennials, the next generation of college graduates are coming out of school and looking for work. These are people who have grown up with technology all of their lives, and probably can’t imagine living without a computer, much less Internet access. The world is a much different place to these people that it was to the Gen X or Baby Boomers before them.
And hiring them takes a new tactic. Reading this article about the way to hire new graduates makes me think of one simple thing: treat people like people, not resources. This is a generation of people that have seen many alternatives to corporate cubicles, and have a different approach towards work. The flexibility and soft perks of a job are often more important than money, which is interesting to me given all the stories about Internet millionaires in the time of The Social Network.
I’ve never liked being referred to as a resource, as some interchangeable chess piece whose performance is easily replaceable by another employer. As much as HR departments have tried to incorporate more tolerance and sensitivity into our workplace, the very way people are described tends to dehumanize them.
I’m not a Millennial, but perhaps I was born a couple decades too soon because many of the things they find important in a job, the autonomy and purpose (talked about in Drive) being more important than compensations, are values I have. We should work, and we should try to give our employer’s a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay. We should also be treated fairly, as fellow human beings and neighbors, not resources.
I needed an image of a “great idea”, and decided to use a light bulb. I started looking through Flickr and then realized I could just as easily do my own picture. So I enlisted Kendall for this series of shots.
We had fun, with Kendall holding some of them and laughing the whole time. It was a fun silly few minutes in our day.
What’s the time for you IT department to get from great idea to a resulting application? This is a very good piece from CIO magazinethat finds many IT departments are seen as too slow. However there are a number of companies that are trying to innovate and find ways to increase the speed at which IT departments can deploy an application and respond to a business need.
One great quote in there is “velocity is more important than perfection”, which is a tenet that I have found to be very true over the years. It’s not that you throw junk out that isn’t well built or tested, but that you don’t try to meet every possible requirement or handle every little issue. The system has to be secure, handle errors, and meet the basic requirements, but it’s more important to get something done and in production than to have it perform and scale perfectly.
Is that heresy to the developers and DBAs out there? Perhaps, but I think this methodology has to go hand in hand with another mantra I heard fromJason Fried: do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. In this case if a system shows promise and starts to get heavy use, it receives more resources and perhaps gets refactoring in real time, even as it gets enhanced with new ideas.
“You want IT to be in constant test-and-learn mode”, another quote showing that IT needs to be working closely with the business to try ideas, learn from them, and move forward. The Agile style of development applies, and in some sense I think this is the future for the strategic IT department of the future.
For the data professional this means that you must learn to model quickly, and with an eye towards a flexible design that might need to change regularly. We need to understand the businesses we work in better so that we can anticipate how requirements might change.
Management has to buy into the idea that applications will not be perfect, they won’t be polished, and most importantly, they are essentially prototypes that either need to have addition resources spent on enhancements or they should be abandoned quickly. However I think this is a great way to develop internal applications that can provide a nice ROI, and be a more enjoyable way for developers to work.
