Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Sabotage at Work

    I caught a link to the OSS’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual from David Perell. It was written as a guide to destroying organizations during WWII to be distributed to citizens of enemy states. The OSS later became the CIA, but their goal was to find ways to disrupt the governments of enemy states.

    What was surprising to me was that some of the advice seemed to still be in use in places I worked in my career. Such as the advice for managers: ” To lower morale and production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.”

    This might seem to be human behavior, and it is, but it also destroys organizations. Too many people in authority don’t seem to do a good job of evaluating those that perform well and drive our software forward. While I do think this is subjective, often the group view from workers and the managerial view of who is efficient can be quite different. Being transparent and open with expectations and evaluations can help here.

    Working in committees and large groups is all too common, at least in US organizations. We hold meetings and have discussions with large groups instead of making decisions. I do agree with getting opinions from a large group, but discussions should be relatively short and then decisions made. We don’t want a dictatorship nor a large democracy of debate, but something in between.

    Maybe one of the more interesting ideas is the work slowly. I don’t know of many workers that want to work slow. Some do, and sometimes we all struggle to get things done, but so often management doesn’t want to invest in tools for workers. Tools can make a job much easier, and much more efficient. Part of DevOps is learning to use tools and become better. Or fabricate your own tools, something we can do in software easily. Too many managers don’t want to budget time or money or build or buy tools.

    It’s easy to self sabotage ourselves, and too often, it’s easy for managers to destroy an organization from within. This might be an interesting manual to review in a meeting and debate if our rules, protocols, and decisions are helping or hurting our organization. Unfortunately, too many managers aren’t willing to perform that self-evaluation.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • The Challenges of Working Under Quarantine

    It’s been nearly two months since the Redgate Software offices closed. I am not normally in the office, but I did cancel a trip that I normally would have taken to touch base with a number of teams. That’s a minor change for me, but a still a change. It’s much less than the change for most other people, and by now, I expect many people have somewhat adapted to working at home.

    Working at home under this pandemic isn’t the same as working remotely. This has been forced upon us, and I agree with Scott Hanselman. Like me, he’s worked remotely for years, and this is different. We have kids, partners, roommates, and others around. We can’t easily change our scenery or engage in some of our usual activities. This is stressful, overwhelming, upsetting, disconcerting, and more.

    Some of you might have accepted this and are learning to work in a new way. Some are coping, but expecting to go back to normal at some point. Some of us are getting much less work done, which adds another level of stress. Performance reviews, and the inevitable comparison with others will weigh on our minds. Whether we go back to normal soon or not, companies will add and remove staff. There are new projects to tackle, raises to award, and all the regular work of running a company.

    This is a difficult time for all, and most of us are experiencing life in our own unique ways. Our view of the world, of coping and getting our daily work done is much different than our co-workers. Even if we appear to be the same people, we aren’t. We may react differently day to day, and there may not be a good explanation.

    This is not the same as remote work, and I hope managers understand that. It is important that we all appreciate that our view of any big or little thing at work is not necessarily the same way others view the same action. A daily standup meeting might seem like a little thing to you, but perhaps it’s exam day for someone else’s child and they can’t focus, or maybe not even attend.

    Be kind, be more flexible, and be more understanding. You never know what someone else might be dealing with in their life today.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Jumping Air Gaps

     

    There are all sorts of viruses, worms, and malware out in the world, and some of us have had to deal with them at different points in our career. SQL Slammer was particularly memorable for me, but there were plenty of non data related virus issues I’ve had to work on at various employers.

    To keep sensitive information safe, many high security environments have built air-gapped computers, where these systems aren’t connected to a network, or at least not a general network in an organisation, and certainly can’t access the Internet. At home, you could think of this as an older computer with no network card, or even a spare laptop with a broken network radio. To get information to/from this computer, you’d use some sort of removable media.

    Apparently there are concerns about malware being able to jump this air gap, using the removable media. Nothing terribly new here, as infected USB sticks have been a concern for years, but this appears to be a twist and apparently the malware waits for a chance to send information off to a receiver.

    If your system is truly air gapped, then there might not be a way for this information to be ever be copied, but what if that isn’t the goal. Imagine ransomware uses this technique and infects database backups. If you have an offline place for backups, could a copy of a new backup infect other backups? With separate tapes this isn’t an issue, but if you use some sort of part-time connection to move data, this could be an issue.

    I’m always wary of online backups or even live copies of data. I know many large systems find tape unusable and impractical, but I know that having physical copies of tapes ensured some level of security for my backups.

    The creativity of malicious actors and the threat vectors they devise are scary and incredibly hard to guard against. I don’t know what the best solution is for data and database backups, but I certainly hope that someone smarter than me is working on the problem.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Enriching Your Life

    As I was looking to build career goals for the new year, I think mostly about technical topics. That makes sense, given my focus and job, but I ran across an interesting thread on Hacker News that asked about skills to work on in 2020, and not necessarily technical ones.

    I did find it interesting that one of the first comments was self improvement, and quite a few comments on cooking, both as a skill to learn and a way to save money. There are plenty of comments on other non-technical skills, but since this is a technical site, I wanted to focus there.

    We’re over a third of the way into the year, and we’re dealing with a pandemic. Business is slow, many people have lost employment, and it’s possible many more will. Fewer companies are hiring, so there is a need to stand out more if you find yourself looking for a new job.

    With that in mind, what types of things would you work on if you knew you’d need a new job by the end of the year. Let’s say that you have seven months to prepare to look for a new job on Jan 1. What would you work on?

    Leave a comment and let us know today.

    Steve Jones