Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • Hiring Guitarists

    This editorial was originally published on July 1, 2013. It is being re-run as Steve is on vacation.

    Hiring good people is hard, though in some cases it might not matter as much as others. If I am hiring entry level developers or DBAs, I have a lot of candidates, I’m not investing a lot, and I shouldn’t be too concerned if I have to let someone go and find a new employee. Given the fact that the people are often unproven in this case by definition (they’re junior levels), I should be prepared as a manager to make more mistakes at this level.

    However at the senior level, hiring needs to be done more carefully. The high costs, the limited number of candidates, the responsibilities I give senior people, along with the trust I need to bestow upon them means that I can’t afford to make the same percentage of mistakes at the senior level. Most importantly, I don’t want to hire expert beginners instead of experts at this level.

    I ran across a post on a way to hire senior developers that I thought was very interesting. In particular, I was struck by the analogy of hiring a guitar player. For the most part, I’d agree that if I wanted an experienced guitar player, I’d want the expert, not the expert beginner. If for no other reason than I don’t want to argue with an employee that does things my way, including making the same mistakes I’d make, and then explaining to me this is how I had specified things to be. I want a senior people to warn me, and influence me to do better.

    I’m not sure how I’d devise a similar level of test for a senior level DBA, though I do like the idea of giving them some scenario or simulation that has flaws or problems and seeing if they’d correct them, point them out, or leave them in place as they moved on to “play” the scenario. I’m sure there’s a way to do this, and a balance between how to evaluate the responses.

    Ultimately I want senior people to fix things, make them better, and provide a smooth path to increase quality. I want them to point out flaws, and warn me about issues. If I insist on making poor choices, I want their support, but if they can influence me to do better, I’d prefer they did. That’s one mark of a senior person.

    Steve Jones

     

  • Accelerating Your Career

    This post was originally published on Apr 23, 2013. It is being re-run as Steve is on vacation.

    I ran across an article on ways to accelerate your career and for the most part I think these are good ideas and suggestions. Networking, finding a mentor, and more will help you no matter what business or field you are working. Some of the advice is geared towards those people looking to climb the corporate ladder and move into management, which is not necessarily what many of us want. If that’s the case, ignore those items. There was one item, however, that I thought was particularly interesting for data professionals.

    The seventh item on the list notes that you should spend 10-15% of your time working on a project that’s outside of the scope of your job or team. That might sound crazy, and even dangerous, but it’s a good idea if your boss isn’t opposed to it. Having knowledge about the way your business works, the way they use data, or solve a problem, could be valuable in your existing job. You might notice a pattern or way in which you could improve either your job or someone else’s. Over time, helping in a variety of departments builds friendships, increases your networking, and might show your boss you deserve a raise.

    Many of us end up working with data as a widget. The job of a developer or DBA is writing code or managing data, and sometimes don’t often think much about the actual industry in which we are working. Gaining deeper knowledge of the way your particular business works means you can better understand why you are asked to solve a particular problem. That knowledge can lead to a better solution. It might also make your job just a little more interesting.

    For the typical US worker, that’s 4-6 hours a week. For the IT person, that might be a little more time, but I think it’s worth the investment. I wouldn’t be overly driven in this area, and if I were working on extra projects at work, I’d eliminate (or cut down) on the time I was spending learning new technologies. Life requires balance, and if you tackle something new in one area, make sure you know what you can give up.

  • Learning through Puzzles

    A few years ago I ran across the Advent of Code challenge. It’s an interesting set of puzzles that you are asked to solve. Most are at a scale that wouldn’t be practical to solve manually. Once you solve a puzzle, there is usually a second part that’s unlocked (you must put in the solution) and then your progress is tracked on the site. A new puzzle is released every day leading up to Christmas, but you can skip around and solve puzzles as you like after that. I had fun in 2016 working through puzzles in T-SQL, PoSh, and Python. I need to go back and work the 2017 items.

    Recently I was trying to brush up on some Python skills and ran across the PythonHow challenge. Before going on to rework some exercises and coursework, I decided to see what I remembered. The  puzzles are easy, but one leads you to the next. In other words, you start with pythonhow.com/start, when you solve the puzzle, you get a letter, say “r” (that’s not right). You change the URL to pythonhow.com/r/ and you get the next challenge.

    That’s a neat way to get build a flow. I could imagine that as a way of teaching someone new skills. Maybe you want to help someone learn R (currently our Wednesday Questions of the Day) or window functions. Give them a problem, and once they solve it, the answer leads them to the next puzzle. A puzzle game, but one that paces you according to your understanding of a topic.

    I wonder how many people might like learning like this, or perhaps might be frustrated when they can’t solve something. Maybe this is a nice addition to something like a Stairway Series, giving readers a chance to practice skills. Do you think this is a good idea? Not a super hard, challenge the experts, but maybe a way to help those that are beginners or intermediate SQL people learn to code better.

    Maybe some of you would like to build some small puzzles in T-SQL that we could link together? This might be a fun way to set up a T-SQL Advent calendar one year. Feel free to submit some to me.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.0MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • Who’s Licensed?

    My employer licenses software to users. Many of you might have SQL Compare, SQL Prompt, or one of our other handy products. If you do, you might have noticed that we have a Redgate login for you that shows your licenses and lets you activate/deactivate them. This was surprisingly a big project across the last year to streamline and smooth our licensing process.

    Early on, I realized this was an issue in one company I where I worked. This was during the 1990s and I started working at a small company with a fancy imaging system. We had purchased software to receive all our faxes as images and file them in a digital system. I’m sure we had one of the smallest (and cheapest) installations of this software, which one of our executives had managed to negotiate. However, the exec had left the company and a few months into my tenure, I needed support.

    Finding our account, verifying our status, and re-enabling an old email account were a few of the cumbersome steps we completed to link the software to our organization. As soon as this was done, I realized this process had created a single point of failure, something I’ve tried to avoid as a technology professional. Immediately I set up a new email (licensing@ourdomain.com) and changed our account to this email. In fact, in all future purchases of software and hardware, I linked all support, warranty registrations, purchasing contacts, and more to this email. I also had this email forward to both myself and the CFO (he got an email rule set up to file this away).

    Since that time, I’ve tried to use centralized contacts for my employers, ensuring that any vendor contact would outlive my tenure. I haven’t always been consistent, and certainly with SQLServerCentral, I purchased any number of things under my own email, assuming if I weren’t there, the company wouldn’t be. However, I did make sure that I put all contact info in a Password Safe that my business partners had copies of.

    I wonder how many of you bother to worry about longevity when you contact a vendor or purchase software. There are certainly times when a personal email makes more sense (research, working to craft an ROI), but for formal contacts, and registrations, a more generic contact might make sense.

    Actually, I’d like to see more vendors take this approach, building their CRM and sales systems to take a general contact and then a list of individuals that might be personal contacts. They could easily add new licenses to this account, tracking them in a central area, perhaps even ensuring that renewals would be a more efficient process.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 5.2MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.