Traveling to the City of Angels today. Read: Where Do You End Up as a DBA?
Category: Editorial
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Communicate Smarter Not More
I recently installed Microsoft Teams. Not because I wanted to, or because Redgate is abandoning Slack, but because Microsoft requires it for some MVP calls. This replaces Skype for Business (S4B), and while it worked OK, I’m not sure it worked better. In fact, for the use cases I have, Teams feels like an abandonment of the Skype codebase for a newer version of the same thing. That’s fine, and I don’t really care. It’s slightly annoying as I have S4B for internal stuff at Redgate and didn’t need another tool, but with a modern, quad core, 2.xGHz CPU and 32GB of RAM, one more application isn’t going to break anything. It is, however, making me less productive.
We have lots of ways to communicate. In fact, I have Twitter (social media), Slack (work comms), Outlook (email), S4B (calls) and a mobile phone all running as I write this. I don’t get too caught up in any of them, and I have most notifications disabled, precisely for the reasons outlined in this article: the tools can be a productivity drain. I know this, and most of these tools actually live in the background, behind the various tools I use to get work done. I check them at times, but try to stay off most of the day. I need to focus, and having more communication methods is distracting.
There was a day not too long ago when I needed to find a person that had missed a meeting time. Messages went out through Slack DMs, Twitter DMs, text, Skype IM, and email, hoping that a notification would pop up for someone on some app. I know I’ve used Slack like a PA system at times, pinging other people to go find someone that wasn’t responding to messages. For someone working remotely, it’s frustrating to try and reach out to others, but I’ve seen people in an office take the same tactic, reaching out electronically, which often creates more interruptions and distractions for others. I don’t know if this is that much worse than walking around an office and physically interrupting others, but I do think it can be more pervasive as too many of us have constant notifications on devices that don’t go away when the workday ends. We also do it more, because it’s so easy. Getting up to walk around is a bar that deters some people from interrupting others.
What might be even harder to deal with is the linkage of various applications together. Now I see GitHub messages in GitHub, Slack, and Email. It’s a barrage of items that aren’t hard to handle, but they each take away a little bit of time and attention.
That’s the downside of communication methods. Each requires a little time, even if just to click/swipe/eye roll at a notification. Those little bits of time add up and don’t necessarily help us be more productive. Some things require too much time as I’ve watched people look through and consider just the right emoji to use for a reaction on Slack. Most of the time I think there should just be a couple choices, because the richness of the variety equates to the decline of quality time spent on work that needs to be done.
We constantly hear that communication skills, those soft skills of relating to others and exchanging information clearly, are important. They are, but I think there is another element to communicating well: brevity. Learning to communicate effectively, in a way that allows you yo get your message across quickly, while also being able to focus for long periods of time is a skill more of us need. Being able to turn off distractions, or delay responses when quickness isn’t needed will help you be more productive and efficient. I think one of the interview questions I’d ask in the future would be around how to deal with the constant barrage of Slack/Teams/Skype/Outlook/Github/whatever-comes-next messages.
Do you know how to reduce the overload of communications in your job? Let us know today.
Steve Jones
Listen to the podcast at Libsyn
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The Impediments to Change
SQL Server is releasing a new version of the engine every 12-24 months at this point. That puts pressure on all of us to learn constantly about the changes. Even if we don’t look to upgrade all of our existing instances, we can’t buy older versions when the new one is released. Often many of us would like to install the latest version for new systems, but that isn’t always possible. If we can, then we have a new version to support.
Recently I was reading ArsTechnica and they posed a question about the impediments to adopting new technology at work. Their query was in the form of a survey, and they’d like you to answer if you can. I took the survey, and I thought it was a bit vague in some sense, mostly around networking and communications rather than other areas, but perhaps that’s their focus.
In any case, it often can be difficult for some companies to decide to upgrade their database servers. Licensing cost is a real concern, and while it pales with the cost of labor, I am not sure I’ve seen many features that would actually reduce labor costs significantly. Most the features might make some aspect of development easier (or quicker), but often we have solutions or code in place that we don’t want to spent time changing. Upgrading older platforms is also a nebulous proposition. The improvements in HA/DR, quicker data loads, and more might be worth changing versions, but the capital cost can be hard to justify. Deciding to install the latest version for a new server isn’t necessarily going to reduce any labor costs, and it could increase them, since staff now needs to understand the new platform.
Perhaps hardware inhibits you from making changes. Is there a point in upgrading from SQL 2008 to SQL 2017 for working applications if you don’t change hardware? Is it worth buying modern hardware? Glenn Berry would argue yes, but not everyone agrees, especially in upper management. This might even be true in upgrading minor parts of your existing system. Can you add RAM? Cores? Does your storage subsystem ever receive improvements? While hardware is certainly a capital expenditure, small changes could make big impacts to users, despite the reluctance to invest in older systems.
Are there other reasons you don’t upgrade? Is staff knowledge an issue? Perhaps you have concerns about support personnel having to work with new systems. There might even be other reasons to avoid change. Time might be the biggest one with people busy on other projects. If you have some thoughts, drop a note in the discussion today. I’d be especially interested if you have Software Assurance and don’t regularly take advantage of that to upgrade. We’d also love some short articles on your experiences upgrading if you’re willing to write about them.
Steve Jones
Listen to the podcast at Libsyn.
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The Death of the GDPR
When I first heard of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, I was disheartened. It sounds like another over reaction by politicians to a crisis that would create lots of work for companies. At the time I was working for a software vendor and while we weren’t bound by many regulations, we did value our ISO certification. As we went through the SOX audit, it felt a lot like our ISO audit the previous year. In fact, we re-used most of our work, and re-did some, making it compliant with both items.
A few years ago, we started GDPR preparations at Redgate, as well as talking and working with customers. We built some products, like SQL Provision and our Data Catalog, with the hope that they would be useful to organizations looking to ensure compliance. We have seen many companies trying to comply, and I’m glad that we can help. I think the GDPR is a step in the right direction for the future of how we manage and deal with data.
I’m also glad that companies are taking the idea of data rights and data privacy more seriously. I think those of us in technology have been lax, and management of many companies even worse. I think I may some some evidence in this piece about possible lack of enforcement of the GDPR by Ireland. Not to discuss politics, but I completely understand when a very large company brings a lot of revenue to a country, there will be hesitation in disturbing that relationship.
Regardless of the politics, I did find this quote interesting. A report in 2011 on Facebook’s data handling practices had this quote: “We do not consider that reliance on developer adherence to best practice or stated policy in certain cases is sufficient to ensure security of user data…” This didn’t prompt Facebook to make changes to process, and Ireland has not pressured them to do so, even with the GDPR taking effect last year. I’m hoping this isn’t the death of the GDPR as a set of regulations.
I completely agree with the sentiment of that quote. We can’t trust that developers will adhere to best practices, or that companies will protect data. Sometimes this is ignorance, sometimes human error, and other times willful disregard for rules and regulations. We do need some sort of enforcement of the data handling practices that we as a society want to see in place. We certainly have to decide what practices to codify in our framework and we need some enforcement.
I don’t know that very large tech companies will get fined or forced to better handle data, but for many of us that work in smaller organizations, we don’t have the clout or impact of a multi-billion dollar revenue organization. We might see fines that can very much hurt our businesses. We ought to be ensuring we not only follow best practices, but we build data security in by design and default. It’s cheaper and easier to do so, and it ensures we don’t fail to go back and fix things later.
It’s also something each of us, as data professionals, ought to take pride in doing.
Steve Jones
Listen to the podcast at Libsyn.
