It’s another Monday off for me, this time likely catching up on some fall maintenance before it gets really cold. Plus, I’m gone in the UK next week.
While I’ve likely doing something with my hands, and concentrating outside, you get to read about doing that inside: Limiting the Ability to Concentrate and Collaborate
It’s been a good year for me. With my sabbatical, I felt like I’ve gotten away from work quite a bit this year. I’ve had a few vacations around that, but I still find myself with quite a bit of time off to use this year.
So today is the start of that. I’m taking a number of Mondays off, as that’s my wife’s day off. I will also schedule a few other days around the holidays.
I don’t know if I’ll get rid of all my days, but I’ve gotten down to 4 days with my schedule and might see if I can get a few more gone before Dec 31.
Hopefully you’re doing the same thing and not saving any days for next year unless you have big plans to use them.
This was one of the original values:
The facing page has this text: No matter how smart you are, or how good you are at narrowly defined tasks, there is no room for you here if you’re an asshole.
This is a similar value to that I’ve seen at a few companies, such as Google’s: Don’t be evil.
I think this is one of those values that has held true over time. We try to be professional and respectful with each other. We don’t want to offend others or treat them poorly. The Oxford dictionary has this definition: “a stupid, irritating, or contemptible person.”
I probably stretch the limit of this at times, but I’m not trying to be out of balance with my pressure on others to do better work alongside my respect for them and my desire to be positive. I might not always get the balance right, but I am willing to apologize if I’ve stepped over the line.
I don’t think of anyone at Redgate as being an a**hole, which is a nice feeling. Hopefully, I’m not one.
I have a copy of the Book of Redgate from 2010. This was a book we produced internally about the company after 10 years in existence. At that time, I’d been there for about 3 years, and it was interesting to learn a some things about the company. This series of posts looks back at the Book of Redgate 15 years later.
Most of you reading this work in technology, and I assume that you’ve had to learn something new on the job. Technology is constantly evolving, even on our existing platforms. On top of that, we are regularly given tasks that are outside of our current skill sets. Maybe not far outside, but to meet the changing demands of our jobs, we need to learn new things.
I ran across an interesting post (on a new site) from Brent Ozar. I think that guy writes as much as me, but he wrote this one: Why I Started Using Postgres (And You Might Too). It’s a little provocative, but there are good posts on the site about things Brent learned in PostgreSQL. I won’t go into whether learning PostgreSQL is a good idea.
The thing that struck me in this post is that Brent knew that this move was a risk. He was worried about moving to a new platform, despite all the reasons he had for doing making the change. I would bet a lot of us are in similar situations. It might not be PostgreSQL we are being asked to learn, but it could be Fabric, Databricks, Python, PowerShell, CosmosDB, or whatever other thing someone in our organization thinks is cool.
The best sentence in here is this: “I gambled that I’d be able to learn how to do performance tuning quickly enough, …, in time to head off issues.” That’s the attitude I’ve often had in my career when I get requests to do something new.
I’m willing to bet on myself.
You should be willing to do so as well. Not bet on me, but on yourself. I know you don’t want to work 80 hours a week to learn, or get stuck trying to solve problems every weekend with new tech. However, I hope you are willing to do that for a week or one weekend. You’re willing to do some reading at night or experimenting during lunch in order to make something work.
You’re going to have tough times. You’re going to question if you can make something work. Getting comfortable with being uncomfortable (for short periods) is how we grow and learn. It’s how we take leaps forward.
It’s how we take advantage of opportunities that are in front of us.
There are always opportunities to make a difference, to effect change, to build something you are proud of or that your organization values. Those stressful times when you drive to make something new succeed and have to learn a new skill in the process, these are the times when you can take advantage of an opportunity.
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