What Do You Want to Know Before Negotiating Salary?

Posted on October 3, 2021 by way0utwest

Many of us are employed, and while we might have a salary review each year, we often don’t get to negotiate much about the amount. We might periodically ask for a raise of some sort, but what should we ask for? Most of us have accepted employment at some point, responding to the offer of a job. Do we know what a fair salary is for our position, in our location, with our experience?

Human Resources and Personnel departments use surveys and information to set ranges of pay for different positions. They come to a salary negotiation with some idea of the market, which is a generalization of what an employee is worth. This could be quite different than what you specifically feel you should be paid. However, do you have any rationale for your demands?

Every year Brent Ozar runs a salary survey. He gets lots of responses and does a better job of this than most other places I’ve seen. Including me. I’ve done this a few times, but I’d rather just let Brent run this and view his data. This year he asks you to look at the list of questions and give feedback.

I think Brent has a good list of questions, but perhaps there is something you wish you’d have known before you last negotiated salary. Is there something that might help you decide if an offer (or raise) is fair? Perhaps you want to add a checklist of responsibilities (BI, DBA, dev, etc.).

Maybe you think it would be interesting to know if there is on call work, or even the number of hours your employer expects you to work? Given the pandemic I might ask if the company is allowing remote work or expecting people to come back to an office. Some people have suggested these in the comments, but read Brent’s answers. He’s looking for a indicators or features that affect salary, not necessarily how you feel about the environment. I added one about non-monetary compensation like training, but feel free to comment on other suggestions as well.

What’s really important here is that you take the survey when it comes out. Even if you don’t like the questions, getting this data compiled for our industry helps us all, so keep an eye out for the survey and fill it out to the best of your ability. Then get the results when they are published and use them to try and evaluate if you’re being compensated fairly.

Steve Jones

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Tesla Autopilot and School Zones

Posted on October 1, 2021 by way0utwest

The other day I had to run an errand early in the morning. I happened to follow the route I used to travel daily to take my kids to school. I had to pass the elementary school near my house and then the high school.

In neither of these cases was I using Autopilot. I find it to be a bit unnerving on busy country roads with no median. There’s a bias towards the middle of the road, and often I see drivers coming towards me staring at their phones, so I reserve Autopilot for those times when no one else is on the road. If I see a car, I disable it.

I was using cruise control, however, and as I approached the active school zones, I turned it off. There weren’t any incidents, but the recognition of the road conditions by the Tesla OS (?) was disturbing to me.

For both of these schools, they are facing a busy road. The elementary school is on a 45mph road. In the morning and afternoon, as school opens and closes, there is an hour during each time period where a flashing yellow light highlights a 20mph speed limit sign.

Some people don’t see this, which is scary. There is a fence to keep kids back, this is still a little scary for me, even though my kids are adults. However, most people slow down, and that often gets humans who notice the change in speed to slow down. Not to 20mph, but I think most get down to 30mph.

The Tesla usually notes speed limit signs. However, as I slowed into the zone and passed the 20mph sign, the Tesla still displayed 45mph on the console. The was repeated near the high school. That road is a 35mph zone, but has the flashing yellow above a 25mph sign.

In both cases, I would think this is an easy AI/ML thing to recognize.

What’s confusing to me is that the OS usually finds other signs. There is a construction area just West of my house, where the road detours slightly. There are orange signs propped up on the side of the road (along with cones) that note the speed limit goes from 40mph to 35mph to 25 mph. The Tesla recognizes and displays all these changes.

When it sees a 40mph sign after emerging Southbound, it displays 40mph. Northbound, there is no speed limit sign after leaving the construction area. The Tesla continues to display 25mph for the next mile or two, while most humans realize the 25mpg no long applies. At least, I doubt a police officer would stop anyone for doing 40mph, though technically the limit is likely still 25mph without a sign.

I’ve seen a few posts that Teslas don’t quite get school zones for some reason. This isnt’ an area where Autopilot should be used, IMHO, though I suspect there are people using the Full Self Driving near schools.

I have often used cruise control in these zones, set to 20mph or 25mph, since the two near my house are rather long, but I haven’t trusted Tesla to enable it in this case. In other cars, I slow to 20 and then press a button, which keeps the car moving slow.

I don’t know how other car companies might approach this, but I do think that school zones are one of those difficult cases that appear easy to recognize as humans, but might not be as easy for computers. This certainly is one of those situations that might prevent Level 5 driving from being accepted by many.

I love the car, but I continue to respect that using some of the driver assist features means these are assisting you, not driving for you.

There’s a video of this post as well.

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Do You Have a Talent Gap?

Posted on October 1, 2021 by way0utwest

I have seen articles over the years that talk about a talent gap in companies, similar to this one. For a long time early in my career, it seemed anyone that went through a boot camp could get a job, and we had lots of unqualified people earning lots of money. I know I’ve run into my share of paper-CNE’s, paper-MCSE’s, and more in my career that took advantage of that talent gap. Over time it seemed that many companies stopped relying on certifications in hiring, but this didn’t seem to help us find more qualified workers. We either were short of staff or still had plenty of people that couldn’t do the work that well.

During the last year, I have seen lots of articles about companies that are struggling to find workers at all levels, even though the pandemic has broadened the search space. Companies learned to work remotely and many started to hire people in different cities. I know a lot of people that changed jobs in the last year. Many landing a remote position at a company they would rarely if ever, drive to visit. I still hope the pandemic repercussions will include hiring more people in different locations, though that may not be the case for all organizations. Many managers seem to assume they will bring everyone back into an office at some point.

However, the talent gap is real, and it’s existed for years. There has been a concern for many years from managers about their staff having the proper skills for the future. I hear constantly from customers that they don’t have enough trained people that understand some of the modern tools available. This is especially true for those technologies that are DevOps related. This includes version control, which I think is a basic skill. There are plenty of people that don’t understand the basics of writing code and committing it in Git.

I do think some talent gap of this is the result of technology changing so fast, with new options and products to learn. Many of us feel we can’t ever keep up. I know I do, though I think that’s both true and not something to worry about. If you don’t use tools at work, you might think there’s no point in learning about them. If you are excited about technology, you can still be intimidated by all the choices out there. Do you look at Jenkins or Azure DevOps? We email scripts around, so is there a point to git? I even feel that way with Redgate products. They update every week or two and I’m always behind in trying to learn about them and decide if I need to worry about a specific feature.

I think the talent gap is real, but I also think that learning to be comfortable with being a little uncomfortable is important. It’s unlikely you will be an expert with a tool anytime soon, so learn to be productive and effective. Maybe, more importantly, learn to learn. Spend time going through a tutorial or tackling a walk-through and get some comfort with technology. If you do need to learn more, then you can ask for resources.

The talent gap is real for many of us, and certainly for many organizations. That’s not likely to change, so learning to adapt to the situation is probably best for all of us.

Steve Jones

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

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Daily Coping 1 Oct 2021

Posted on October 1, 2021 by way0utwest

I started to add a daily coping tip to the SQLServerCentral newsletter and to the Community Circle, which is helping me deal with the issues in the world. I’m adding my responses for each day here. All my coping tips are under this tag.

Today’s tip is to make some plans to do something you find enjoyable this weekend.

This is the time of year that is a bit hectic. More travel and trying to prep the ranch for winter.

However, I actually have a couple of things to do this weekend. First, I’m aiming to take a couple hours and go watch some volleyball. A couple of the kids I’ll coach this year are playing each other in high school Saturday, so I’m going over.

Second, my cousin is in town, and I’m going to take some time to meet with him and catch up.

Not as productive a weekend as I’d like, but I’m going to enjoy the time with others and then get to work around those items.

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