Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Do Hybrid Conferences Work?

    The pandemic forced many events online, which has worked fairly well inside many companies and certainly spurred some technological advances in how we meet and share information. With the pandemic ending or at least entering an endemic phase, there are many live events now, as well as some attempting to embrace a hybrid philosophy.

    I went to two conferences in 2022 that embraced the hybrid concept: SQL Bits and the PASS Data Community Summit. I was just a speaker at the former, and mostly a speaker at the latter, though I saw quite a bit of the behind-the-scenes action from the organizers’ perspective at the Data Community Summit.

    During SQL Bits, I watched a hybrid session with a remote speaker. I also presented two sessions with a moderator that was engaged with the virtual attendees. The experience watching a remote presenter wasn’t great, and the audio at times was hard to hear. I also spoke with a few virtual presenters who also noted they struggled to hear people in the room. All in all, it felt somewhat live, but I felt disengaged from the speaker, and missed a feeling of interaction from the picture-in-picture of the individual speaker inside the larger screen. It was just too hard to see them and understand body language.

    At both events, the sessions I presented with a moderator went well, and I felt the moderator could be a good proxy for people online. I also know that I have little visibility into what people online see and hear. I’ve gone out of camera range at times, and I rarely know if the virtual audience can see my entire screen, me, or some combination of both, much less hear what I’m saying.

    After the Summit, I read a post about hybrid events from Andy Galbraith, which made a lot of sense to me. I enjoyed seeing and speaking with Andy in Seattle, though I know that our interactions would have been fewer, less satisfying, and less connected if we were virtual using Spatial.IO or some other technology. Spatial has been the best online platform I’ve seen for groups, but it’s still not great.

    Like Andy, I don’t want to pick a fight, but I have a few perspectives on why I don’t think hybrid works for the most part. First, it’s resource expensive. The equipment, people, and time spent putting the show together make it less attractive for most events, even paid. The people managing AV find it more than twice as hard to manage the technology and don’t like the added stress.

    Second, the interaction is still very limited, and when we do try to interact, it’s full of pauses and stutters in conversation that make this much worse than in person. Even a proxy adds delays and a very un-natural feeling to the engagement.

    Lastly, we don’t really create the same engagement as the view from a virtual event is very limited, and one can’t really engage with other attendees in the same way we can in person. Not only in sessions but before/after and in other spaces. Meetings with more than ten people are often hard to engage with more than a few people, so I don’t expect we can make things better when there are 50, 100, or more people in a virtual meeting.

    I appreciate the accessibility aspect of virtual attendance. I think we ought to have more virtual events. I was glad we had a few virtual SQL Saturdays in 2022 and I’d like to see more in 2023. If you want to put one on, especially with a niche technology, please reach out. I’d love to see more of these events.

    I just don’t think hybrid works. Not at large conferences, not at SQL Saturday, and not at user groups. My view is you should choose one or the other. Make it in-person or virtual.

    That being said, I do like the broadcast efforts from large conferences. I thought PASSTV was great. I have enjoyed the shows between sessions at Ignite and Build, and I hope we can do some of that for the 2023 PASS Data Community Summit. One thing I think has worked well across decades is broadcasting. The effort is lower and the experience for the remote audience can be better. They aren’t included, but they can see a “show” that is better than a clumsy attempt at bringing thousands of people into a “room” of some sort.

    I don’t think hybrid conferences work, but I know I’m biased in that I help run and organize live events. I want to see more live events in the future, and I want to see more virtual events.

    Just not together.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.

  • The Cost of Employee Turnover

    Sometime during the first 3-4 months of the pandemic, after offices all over the world closed, I thought that a lot of businesses would try to hold on to existing employees and minimize turnover. I also thought many employees would be nervous about changing jobs amid all the uncertainty.

    That wasn’t the case everywhere, and I was surprised at how much employee turnover occurred in many companies during 2020 and 2021. We had the Great Resignation, where talented employees (and some not-so-talented) found new employment with lots of remove flexibility. We typically have low turnover at Redgate, but more surprising to me was the number of people we’ve hired in the last two years.

    Our gains come from losses elsewhere. It seems a lot of companies have had a bit of turnover, more than they liked.  The costs of replacing a staffer has climbed to an average of USD$57k, according to a recent poll of hiring managers. I’m sure this is a combination of the time and money spent on recruiters and interviews as well the lost productivity of having less people around.

    For many of us working in technology, we realize that losing good people is a problem. Often we lose undocumented knowledge about our systems,  those shortcuts, checks, small tasks, not-so-obvious fixes, and more that make life easier. We can feel more stressed about additional work, or even the anticipated unknown challenges we might face. Moral, productivity, and motivation decrease, which creates a snowball effect. Everyone gets less done, which costs the organization more. Either lower revenue, more costs, or perhaps fewer services for those government or non-profit concerns.

    With large tech companies letting lots of talented people go, I wonder if we’ll see more competition in the employment market. For quite a few years there have been fewer workers than there are jobs. Perhaps that changes a bit in the future, though I still think there are not nearly enough talented workers for the positions open. Good for talented workers as they may have more choices, but also good for less talented workers when companies feel pressure to hire anyone.

    Except, what I’ve seen in a lot of companies is that they don’t want to hire anyone. Having a degree or cert isn’t enough. Companies aren’t going to hire you because you are Azure/AWS/etc. certified. They want tech skills and at least a few soft ones. That creates an even higher cost to fill positions, so maybe that USD$57k isn’t a bad number.

    To me, what this really means is that organizations ought to look at poor management, both middle and upper, and replace those people. That’s the problem in many places, one that isn’t easily fixed. Poor culture, micromanagement, lack of support, little-to-no psychological safety, and more contribute to poor retention.

    Culture is important and building it is hard. While not everyone will have a great culture, many organizations can avoid a poor one by treating people fairly and ensuring management understands how to do that. If for no other reason than to avoid the high costs of replacing staff.

    Steve Jones

  • The Best and Worst Tech of 2022

    There was an article on the worst technology of 2022 from the MIT Technology Review. I was hoping to get some sense of what was really useful or failure-prone technology, but it seems that the article delves into decisions on how to run technology or policy more than the actual technology.

    The list is here, with my short comments on those that might apply as actual technology items:

    • The FTX meltdown – no
    • The fentanyl crisis – no
    • a pig heart to human transplant – maybe. A biotech attempt that didn’t work
    • the issues with zero covid in China – policy, not tech
    • Twitter rules – no
    • Ticketmaster system meltdown – this counts
    • Meta’s Galactica – definitely among the worst

    Many of these seem more about decisions made in how a platform or technology is used, rather than the merits of the system. The FTX thing was less even technology and more a scam using software that likely worked as intended.

    For the best technology, I find many lists that delve into gadgets. Those can be fun and certainly might feel like they change how you use technology. From that list, I know that mobiles and headphones can be exciting, but these always feel incremental to me. I actually have preferred seeing how cheap mid-range headphones have become. I do think the rings measuring health instead of a watch-like device is a little innovative. Tablets, laptops, and TVs, meh.

    In terms of innovative tech, this is quite a list. Shooting a probe at an asteroid is amazing engineering. A personalized info board, seen differently by many different people is fascinating, though a bit creepy. The DALL-E 2 image generator was certainly incredibly tech, albeit controversial. The 3D-printed ear is amazing as well.

    The world of technology for many of us (frameworks, languages, software, hardware) changes so fast. Vendors have shrunk their lifecycles as they move to a DevOps style of working, which creates pressure on us to keep up, or at least be able to learn quickly as versions change. We certainly don’t want to work on the worst technology, and maybe not the best because it changes fast. Instead, we need to pick and choose those items that are relevant to those that hire us to get things done.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.

  • The Tech That is Gone

    The world of technology has undergone an amazing revolution in my lifetime. Things that I thought were incredible in my youth have come and gone in the world. I’m sure that there were dramatic changes in technology across lots of other generations, but I wonder if they were as dramatic for others as they feel for me.

    As I watch older movies, I’m amazed at the evolutions. I was watching an older sitcom recently and saw someone using a cordless phone. While we have these cordless mobile devices, there was a time when having a phone in my house that wasn’t tethered to a spot on the wall was incredible. And I haven’t seen one of these in years.

    My Mother worked in real estate and getting an answering machine was critical technology for growing her business. These were essential in every home for a long time (along with call waiting). First tape-based, then SSD, but now these devices are really gone and exist in the cloud. Now you get voice mail and call waiting on a mobile device. Does anyone have an answering machine anymore? For that matter, are there still public phones? I’ve seen a few booths in my travels, but they seem to be mostly standing as tourist attractions for pictures or repurposed as small libraries or wi-fi hotspots.

    One of my big career steps was working with an import company that lived off faxes. When I was there, we went from a single computer-based fax service to upgraded multi-line fax add-in boards with not only digital fax reception but the OCR of the actual recipient to email the images to the appropriate department. It was an amazing job where I learned a lot about imaging and large-scale storage of data. I know there are companies that still have fax machines, but emailing images around seems to have overtaken this in much of the world.

    We still have mainframes and lots of older applications, but one piece of software I expected to see around was Lotus Notes. I know some people might still use it, but IBM doesn’t support it. They’ve outsourced. I guess a lot of software I used early in my career is gone: Ami Pro, WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, and more.

    Maybe one interesting device my wife loved was a Palm Pilot. There were lots of PDAs for a while, but the advances in mobile phones completely did away with that category of devices. I’m actually still amazed that Blackberry couldn’t survive the transition to screen-based devices. For a time it felt like everyone in business carried one around.

    Hard disks and tape changers seem to be fading, though I’m sure someone still uses them. Anyone bought a tape drive for their personal or business use anytime in the last few years? Or for that matter, do you still use CDs or floppy disks anymore? VHS tapes? Dot-matrix printers?

    What about a modem? The sound of a modem connecting was both amazing for me as a young man and an annoying sound early in my career. Same for pagers. I loved getting one but hated carrying it. While there might be these devices in use somewhere, for the most part this technology has been removed from our lives.

    Perhaps one of my favorite devices, which came late and died quickly, was the iPod. I had a few digital music players, but they were hard to manage. The iPod was revolutionary, and I had quite a few over the years. I still have a waterproof Shuffle I use when I swim, but for the most part, these devices are just memories.

    What tech do you miss, or remember fondly? Or perhaps, what old tech do you still work with that you enjoy?

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.