Voice of the DBA

Author: way0utwest

  • Cleaning Up Blogs

    I highly encourage people to blog. I know that not everyone is a writer, but I think that blogging helps build some extremely valuable skills: communication skills. We all need them, and they help us in our careers, no matter what your job.

    At SQLServerCentral, we’ve had a blog section for a number of years. We took the open source Blog.Text project from Microsoft originally, and then migrated to the free Community Server software. At some point we upgraded to a real license, and it’s worked OK. I wouldn’t say I think this is a great use of Community Server, especially as it’s embedded in the rest of the SSC site.

    However, our license is limited to 100 blogs. We have debated on an upgrade, but the Community Server people have been reluctant to increase our blog license without increasing the forums, photos, etc. and they want a fairly significant 5 figure price tag. I’m not sure it’s worth it to us, especially as blogs don’t generate a lot of traffic.

    I still get requests for blogs, and for the most part we are syndicating blogs from people and just displaying the posts from other sites. I suggest to everyone as I don’t have a good backup/export system and most of the main blog platforms (blogger, wordpress, etc) have this built in.

    As I needed to add a new one, I removed a few blogs today. I went through the list and checked a few of the blogs, and found a number that had never had a post. So I removed them to make space and keep us at 100 blogs.

    I hate to remove the change for blogging from people, but if someone is not blogging at all, then I need the space for now. I’m hoping that we’ll consider moving to a new platform, but like everything else, it’s a question of resources to integrate something else like WordPress into our site, or write our own software.

  • Buried

    Coming back after a week off, even a holiday week when traffic is relatively low, is no fun. I have tons of email, lots of articles, and more than a few meetings to get to as well as a lot of writing to catch up on.

    I had hoped to do a little writing over the holiday, but ended up just relaxing with the family and staying fairly unwired. I rarely even tweeted on vacation! A good move for me, and I think it helped refresh me, but it does mean these next few weeks will be very, very busy.

  • Book Review – The Checklist Manifesto

    77693778[1] Andy Warren recommended The Checklist Manifesto to me and after seeing his review, I decided to grab it. It’s written by a surgeon, and starts with a few stories of how people were saved in the ER by some amazing teamwork.

    The book then goes into a discussion on how complex the world is and how we have so much knowledge that we constantly struggle to apply it correctly. Many mistakes in medicine, law, and other fields are often the result of the inability of professionals to apply this knowledge at the right time. We have a data deluge, and he proposes a solution.

    A checklist.

    Not a step by step process, but more a few simple things that you should be sure to do when an event occurs. Using the complex processes of flying planes, building skyscrapers, and even investing, he shows that this doesn’t just apply to medicine, and really makes you rethink the way complex systems should be implemented.

    It’s a great books, and one that I highly recommend you read, especially if you deal with complex systems.

  • Do You Talk Salary in the Interview?

    This is a reprinted editorial from August 2, 2005. It is being republished as Steve is on vacation.

    A friend recently interviewed someone in his company for another position. The internal candidate knows the salary ranges and the position in relation to their current spot. There was a screening by HR and an interview and then a follow up from HR with the candidate. During the follow up, the candidate told HR that the salary wasn’t high enough and that they weren’t interested unless the position could be moved.

    Suffice it to say that my friend was rather upset. He’d spent quite a bit of time on this person and all of it could have been avoided if the salary question had been brought up informally before the interview in the screening or in the hallway. However, he didn’t think the interview was the place to bring it up.

    I’ve felt, or maybe just learned, that I want to bring this up early on in the process. Knowing the salary range on an initial phone interview or contact is something I need to get out of the way because it has at times impacted my decision to proceed. I’m not sure that bringing it up in the interview is a bad thing, however. If there’s no phone interview and someone brings you in, ask at the end of the interview.

    My thought is that if you’ve impressed someone, they might move the range. If not, then you both know this is going nowhere.

    Money is a strange addition to an interview. Lots of times the person making the hiring decision has to make some decision on the offer, but it’s not something they relish doing. Making a decision that affects the person’s life is tough and trying to balance the value you perceive in this candidate alongside those existing employees is hard. I’m sure that’s why most people like having definite ranges that they can fit a person into.

    I never enjoyed making a financial decision for someone, especially determining their salary. My preference is to interview them and give my opinion to someone else to make the offer.

    Steve Jones