Voice of the DBA

Category: Editorial

  • What are you worth?

    Each of us is reponsible for negotiating his or her own salary for a position. Often we don’t have much leverage to exact a higher salary, and even if it’s deserved, so many companies don’t have the flexibility for managers to pay higher salaries than what is set in some range by their HR group. That’s discussed a bit in this post from Chris Shaw that looks at hiring and salaries.

    I’ve always felt that the way we handle salary was developed by owners and managers, and the process benefits them, not the employees. We rarely discuss salaries at work, with disclosure sometimes forbidden. Your salary adjustments over time seem to be highly based on your current salary. That means that your starting salary often determines your future salaries at a company, regardless of your abilities relative to others or the market. Even changes in supply and demand may not affect your salary.

    A few companies have set salary ranges publicly within the company and some even disclose salaries among employees. It sounds strange to many of us, but I’ve talked with a few people that work in those environments and it’s not a big deal. You earn your salary or you don’t, and if you do a good job, no one complains. If you don’t do a good job, then many of these companies are quicker than most to ask you to take a pay cut or leave. Personally, I like that type of environment.

    I doubt we’ll have open disclosure going forward, but fortunately many of us have the ability to change employers easily with our skills if the markets change and we feel we’re underpaid. The flip side is that there can be competition for your job and companies might find it easier to let you go and choose someone else that provides the company a better value.

    The only advice I would give most people looking to negotiate salary these days is that you should ask for what you’re worth, even if it seems high to you. The worst thing that usually happens is the employer says no and offers you a lesser amount. However, if you don’t ask, you won’t get the salary you want.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.4MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • Patching Problems

    I applied the Windows 8.1 update a few weeks ago and had some issues with my machine. Windows was fine, but I lost my SQL Server service. A few others, including some of the SQLServerCentral community also had issues, but their fixes didn’t work for me. It was OK, because the problems gave me a chance to use PoSh to solve a real problem. I’ll be blogging about that in the next week.

    However the 8.1 update has caused lots of issues, and Microsoft is acknowledging these problems. That’s good, but the process gives me pause, and to a large extent, I think this makes more and more people suspect about all of Microsoft’s patching processes. I bet there are companies that feel justified in waiting for SP1 for SQL Server 2014 before upgrading, even though there is a chance that the patch will cause problems itself.
    This is one reason I’ve been hesitant to remain current with Cumulative Updates (CUs). Microsoft doesn’t stand behind them, with the text on each CU page that users should only apply the patch if they are experiencing specific problems. Otherwise users are told to wait for the next Service Pack, which seem to be coming less and less.
    Any patch can cause issues, and I certainly don’t like the idea of automatic updates always being applied because if there are issues, they can become much more widespread than controlled updates. There is also the issue of vendor responsiveness. Microsoft has pushed out patches that caused issues, and while they’ve been responsive, I don’t want to have all of my desktops, or all of my SQL Servers, down because of a bad patch.
    I don’t know how we patch in a more effective manner, but I do know that I want to have some control over updates as an end user, and I also want ways to remove patches. Moving to the app model of always applying patches over patches, and never rolling back seems to be a step in the wrong direction.
    Steve Jones

  • Failure

    Tim O’Reilly has written some great pieces over the years on many aspects of technology and change. I’ve followed him for years and I’ve enjoyed many of his thoughts and views on our industry. I think he’s thoughtful and truly envisions the amazing things that technology can do to change the world, mostly for the better. I think it’s worth randomly reading through (or listening to) some of his thoughts.

    He recently wrote a long piece on the failures he’s had in business with his company, O’Reilly Media. It’s an interesting tale that looks at process, at mis-communications, and business. I think about my career, looking back on past decisions, looking at the way in which companies I’ve been associated with are run, and at the way that others around me have worked. I realize that there are many failures to go with the successes in my life. The piece made me take a good, hard look at my past, drawing parallels to the ways in which leadership at O’Reilly has worked as well as how it has come up short.

    This week, Mr. O’Reilly’s look back led me to this question, which I don’t expect to get many responses from. However I do hope it makes you think, and examine where you are, how you got here, and perhaps where you’d like to go from here.

    How have you failed in your career?

    Maybe you should compare your own experiences to those of Mr. O’Reilly, and think about how you might manage your own business, the business of running your career, differently.

    Like many people, at times in my career I have bounced  from job to job, often taking a position that was available rather than deliberately thinking about my future and moving in that direction. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the last ten years, it’s that I should think deliberately think about what I like and don’t at work. I should honestly state to myself what I want to do and what isn’t worth the pay. 

    I re-examine my career each year, and seriously consider alternatives. I’ve been lucky in that I work for an amazing company and have a great job. No other alternative has measured up against my job so far.

    However I also realize that I’ve had some failures before this success, and I hope not to repeat many of them in the future by learning from my past.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.6MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • Why Don’t We Have Better Practices?

    This essay isn’t quite Safe For Work (SFW) and might offend a few people, so be warned, but I found it somewhat humorous. It’s a look at all the insanity and problems with programming and software in the world. It certainly makes me glad that those of us working on software don’t actually build tangible objects like bridges.

    However the piece did make me think a bit. Why do we have so many conflicts and strange practices in our software systems? Why haven’t we decided upon more good security practices that we widely disseminate and use? Why doesn’t much of our code follow established patterns, like those that we might use to build a bridge?

    I think ultimately it’s because of the ease with which we can “try” something out in code. Our industry allows us to easily build mock ups of ideas, which often get altered and enhanced as we test out ideas to the point where we don’t have time to start over from the beginning in a new way. We continue to build and grow our systems like some sort of bizarre Winchester House, often afraid or uninterested in questioning the conglomeration of architectures that might be contained inside a single application. Even databases are not immune, containing multiple data models and substructures that may or may not mesh smoothly with each other, and often don’t contain much DRI at at all. I also think it’s the NIY syndrome that so many technologists have.

    It seems as though the more we learn about computing, and more important and embedded software becomes in our world, the less we seek to constrain the innovation and impose any sort of engineering or strong discipline on our systems. It makes me think we’ll never get to the highly integrated, and well running computer systems of the future.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.4MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.