Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • How Helpful is a GenAI Copilot

    I’m sure many of you have tried a GenAI LLM to do something. Maybe write some code, maybe get some sort of recommendation or suggestion, maybe to rewrite something or summarize text. I’m sure you have had some feelings about whether the tool made you more or less productive.

    There was a trial conducted by the Australia Department of the Treasury on Microsoft’s 365 Copilot, asking for volunteers to participate and use the tool in their daily work. They used it and then completed a survey, which are summarized in this piece. Only 218 people went through the trial, and the results are interesting.

    The headline says that the staff rated the GenAI less useful than expected. Those last two words are interesting because your expectations shape a lot of how you view anything in the world. If you expect little and get a little more, you might be happy. If you expect a lot and don’t get it, you might be very disappointed.

    The sub-headline and the first sentence note that there still is an ROI from the tool. It isn’t as helpful and isn’t as widely applicable as people expected, but they chalk some of this up to product limitations and some to limited use by people. It was useful in summarizing things and drafting content, which are what they call basic administrative tasks. That’s interesting and likely where GenAI tools can help quite a bit.

    Maybe the most interesting thing to me is that if Copilot saves 13 minutes a week for mid-level workers, it pays for itself. I don’t know how much time it would have to save me, but an hour or two a week might make me use it more. It certainly would be use a small monthly cost. So far, I haven’t committed to regular work with the tools, and I think I still spend more time learning and typing with GenAI tools than I’d like. I’m not sure if I am saving time over just doing the task myself. Some of that is because I have habits that allow me to work quickly and to use a Copilot, my pace slows.

    This also brings up something I wonder about with these GenAI services. With the cost of compute services, there might not be a lot of margin for vendors to raise prices if people are only lightly more productive. I can see lots of companies starting to use these tools, realizing there isn’t as much value as they expected from increased productivity, and then dropping the cost from their budget. That might be some of what we saw in this years State of the Database Landscape, with less people using AI for database management tasks. I suspect some of the hype has died down and people aren’t finding the tools as useful as they expected.

    I do think GenAI is helpful, but just helpful. It can’t do the work, and it can’t be trusted more than a junior worker. At least not yet. Maybe that will change, but I haven’t seen it to date.

    Steve Jones

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

    Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.

  • Rising Pay for Certifications

    Certifications can pay off, at least in some areas. There’s a piece that talks about pay rising for some tech professionals when they have some credentials. Networking, architecture, and project management are mentioned in the report, as are database and data management.

    I haven’t seen the source report, and I’m not sure which certifications are getting higher pay rises, but I’d guess that newer data technologies, things related to cloud databases, and even anything related to AI is likely to get you a raise.

    Note, that I would guess that if you want a raise, you likely need to change employers, as those companies who have skills gaps in their teams are likely to overpay in the short term. There are certainly pockets of change in many organizations that are looking to move faster and adopt new technologies and might need training for existing staff as well as hiring new people to handle the workload.

    There are two interesting quotes in the article related to AI. The first is that companies are learning that the quality of their data impacts their use of AI, and I suspect they might want more people managing data, checking quality, cataloging it, and more to ensure they can use it to train a GenAI LLM.

    The other quote was that “…technologies like AI are forcing organizations to move with lightning speed to fill specific gaps in their job architectures — and too often, they are stumbling.” I read this as AI gives people code they don’t understand, so there is a need to hire someone experienced enough to review AI code. That’s good for experienced people as it creates opportunities, but I wonder if these are short term or this will be a lasting trend.

    This is a tough time in technology, in May 2025 as many companies are being cautious about hiring tech professionals. This might be the time to get a few certifications as companies start to put more weight on them along with experience. The cert doesn’t prove you can do the job, but with experience, it might give hiring managers a little more confidence you are a good choice.

    Steve Jones

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

    Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.

  • Learn to Code

    I thought this story about a programmer and a GenAI to be rather humorous. The individual was a game programmer and used the Cursor AI assistant to help them generate some code for a game. After a few hundred lines of code, the AI delivered this: “I cannot generate code for you, as that would be completing your work. The code appears to be handling skid mark fade effects in a racing game, but you should develop the logic yourself. This ensures you understand the system and can maintain it properly.”

    That response makes me actually smile to myself and chuckle out loud. I likely wouldn’t feel the same way if I were asking for help with some code to handle a task like this, but it’s kind of funny to have the GenAI stop and say this. However, it’s akin to the RTFM response plenty of humans have given others when they were asked a question. This is pointed out in the article as the type of response plenty of people see on sites like Stack Overflow. Fortunately, I think we’ve avoided a lot of that response on SQL Server Central.

    I could see (and maybe expect) this as a response if I asked a GenAI “do I a ROWS or a RANGE framing in this OVER() clause. I should know the result I expect and the impact of those two options. However, if I asked for format of the statement or for an explanation of the difference, I’d expect an answer.

    I don’t know how widely this happens where the LLM stops helping, nor if there are any logs on why this happened. I could certainly guess some executives would want to know if the GenAI “thinks” that the user of the tool doesn’t really understand programming. Many managers might even want to query a GenAI to evaluate the humans using the tools.

    While the GenAI is an assistant, I would hope that we expect anyone doing programming with it actually know how to do the programming. The assistants save time, but the human should be able to check the work and recognize problems.

    That’s not likely how the world works, and I am sure there are lots of people generating code with GenAI that they themselves can’t debug. I know I’ve done that, asking for some C# stuff that’s beyond what I’ve learned. Fortunately, that’s not for my job, but just for fun or to experiment. If I needed to run the code in production, I’d certainly want to understand most of it.

    Steve Jones

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

    Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.

  • Interview Tips

    When is the last time you interviewed for a new position? It could have been at a new company, or maybe you had an interview was for a different position inside your existing company. Perhaps you needed to talk to a manager internally for a new project. I’ve tried to treat all my one-on-one meetings or reviews as interviews since I’m usually trying to impress someone enough to get a raise or promotion.

    Preparing for something you do rarely is hard. Most of us have interviews very infrequently, and we often aren’t prepared to impress others. If your partner or a close friend is also a business person, perhaps they can help you get ready, but I’ve found that most people struggle to help others prepare as they don’t know how themselves.

    I used to interview people periodically as part of my job. I spent time asking others how they evaluated others and reading up on how different companies do this. Over time, I built up a routine of how to run an interview, ask candidates probing questions, efficiently record notes, and evaluate my choices. I became good at running interviews. Not necessarily great at hiring people because that still felt hit and miss, but at least I had a process for evaluating others.

    When I was looking for jobs, which happened a bunch in my late 20s/early 30s, I also had a process and I think I did well. I got offered positions after most of my interviews, which was a luxury since that often gave me a choice of where to work. I saw this post on Linked In with a list of questions and answers for a job interview. These are certainly the type of questions I’ve been asked before, and I’ve prepared for. While this aren’t bad answers, they aren’t enough.

    Some of these might not be asked in internal interviews or reviews, but you ought to be able to give a short answer and then follow it up with an example from your career, give some details and practice delivering those smoothly. Know your own story, and don’t look like you’re fumbling for answers, trying to remember things you’ve done. It’s understandable that you might not remember details of some event from ten years ago, but it is also a sign you haven’t prepared for an interview.

    Getting a job these days is about having some relevant experience, having good soft skills, and standing out from the pack of other people who are applying for the same job. Blogging helps showcase experience, practicing communication helps soft skills, and great stories of things you’ve done help you remain memorable when the interviewer is talking about all the candidates with their peers.

    If you want a new and (hopefully) better job, put in some work and prepare.

    Steve Jones

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

    Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.