Voice of the DBA

Tag: AI

Can an AI Help Me Find a Job?

I’m not looking for a job, but I ran across an article about using AI tools for a job search. So I decided to try it out. I followed a couple of those prompts and get some results. Here is a set of things I did.

Salary Calculators

I ran this prompt from the article: What are some of the best salary calculators for a Data/SQL Server professional? Provide a list of your top 4 recommendations and the pros and cons of each one. Provide any helpful links. Format as a table.

The results? Mixed. Here is what I got from my local Deepseek model. Note, I didn’t get a table.

From Claude:

From Perplexity

Are these helpful? Well, I knew about GlassDoor and the BLS. Didn’t know Robert Half has a calculator. If I had done this a few years ago, I would have Googled this. When I did, I saw Payscale, Zippia, and CompTia. Ziprecruiter had hourly salaries, US News had a link. None of the ones in the table were there.

Both the Payscale link (Google) and Robert Half gave me similar results. Is the AI more helpful? It gave me a few things to think about, but it didn’t find some of the top Google links. Not sure what to think about that.

My Worth

I decided to ask this prompt: I am a senior database administrator with over 20 years of experience working with SQL Server in large and small companies, handling a variety of operational responsibilities. I have developed and implemented high availability solutions, automated server builds, understand DevOps style database development and GitOps management of servers. I have managed replication, built ETL pipelines, and implemented role-based access controls. What is the market value of my skill set?

The local model didn’t really help here. It gives me some generic things to think about and consider, and some ideas of where to look, but no real links.

Claude:

Perplexity:

Adding Skills

From claude:

And perplexity:

Those are interesting ideas. I’m sure I could follow this up and get more details on some of these and perhaps kickstart my learning. These are areas an AI might be helpful to help guide you or develop a plan. Certainly a friend might do this, but it’s tedious work. Getting some links, assembling a plan, etc.

Claude builds a detailed plan on the right side and describes it on the left The plan has a lot of links to documentation for tools below the phases:

Preplexity gives me a plan, with links as footnotes.

Negotiation

I used this prompt as is from the article: I am making $98,000 with 3 weeks of PTO now. I want to ask for an 8% raise and an additional week of PTO. I also want to work from home one more day a week, especially if I can’t get any extra PTO. What guidance do you have for making this request? What other rate negotiation best practices should I keep in mind?

Claude: a decent plan to get prepare.

Perplexity: very similar results

This isn’t a lot different from advice I’d give, but I wouldn’t write this all down. If someone told me this, I might forget some things. A plan is always good, and the AI has given me a decent plan. I might copy this and run it by friends, who are more likely to mark it up or add to it rather than build the whole thing.

It’s an assistant to getting started and a pretty good one.

A Cover Letter

These are a pain, and I always struggle to get one moving. Here are the results from this prompt: Given my experience, help me write a cover letter to apply for a DBA job

Claude: Again, an explanation on the left and a result I can start with on the right. It’s a bit wordy and AI-like, but I can adjust that.

Perplexity: Simpler, but effective.

Note, I didn’t paste anything else in, the AI remembered my experience from earlier in the chat. That’s way, way, way better than working through a search engine.

Summary

For most of us, (I hope) searching for a job is a rare thing. It’s always a pain, and it can be stressful. It’s also easy not to be organized and forget things. A GenAI can assist you with more patience than your friends or family might have. It can give you a good start, but please don’t just copy/paste this stuff or follow it blindly. Ask fellow humans what they think of these recommendations.

The GenAI models are trained on lots of data, and they can function as a sounding board, but they aren’t bringing creativity, and your answers will look a lot like other people’s answers. Lots of people will use an LLM to help them here, so make sure you tweak things to stand out a bit.

And build your brand, and let GenAI help you. Don’t let it write blog posts, but it can sketch things out that you edit and clean up. That editing and cleanup skill will help you in interviews and jobs, so don’t forget to polish the final product yourself. Let the GenAI be an assistant that gets you started and that’s it.

March 17, 2025
Why Not Use AI?
Erin Stellato, a program manager at Microsoft, asked a very interesting question on LinkedIn: “why do you *not* want a Copilot in SSMS?”

That got me to stop and think a minute. Why don’t we want to use an AI to help us? It’s a good question, given the hype and (maybe) potential of the technology. While it might not help you now, or with your specific thing, it might help others, so are there good reasons not to use AI technologies, like the GenAI LLMs?

Let me know today. What are you reasons for not using them (apart from cost or restrictions at work)?

I will say that I rarely use AI tech to get work done, or even in my home life. I just don’t enough places where I think I need help outside of a search. I search a lot, but I haven’t found AI to be faster than searching. Sometimes it is, but sometimes not and the unreliability of the tech bothers me. That being said, I do have a tag where I write about the AI things with which I am experimenting.

I think for many of us, AI is too amorphous and unclear. We don’t quite know when it helps or doesn’t. We don’t know how to judge the quality of it. It’s also not a habit or integrated into life. Most of the suggestions I see in various places aren’t things I’d ask. The default page in my local mode has these suggestions:
- tell me a fun fact
- show me a code snippet of a website header
- give me ideas for what to do with kids’ art
- help me study for a college entrance exam
That last one might be the only question I ask, not for college, but maybe for something like an MS exam. However, is the AI better than a search? Maybe, but I’d have to try it. Right now I’d be tempted to just search for a list of things to study. Maybe the AI helps me find those better, but really I’d want it to quiz me on different things.

The problem is I don’t trust it to ask good, relevant questions, or necessarily give me the right answers if I asked it to quiz me.

I guess ultimately is I don’t have enough “I think an AI is better” reasons over the do what I normally do. Without substantial evidence AI is better, I don’t use it much. Do you feel the same way?

Steve Jones

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February 26, 2025
Trust is a Funny Thing

I caught an article on AI skepticism and there was a point in the article where trust was mentioned. Specifically the reasons that people distrust an AI or tech tool is that it makes a mistake, so they stop using it. A few examples of this were using a writing AI that made a grammar mistake or a GPS routing device that added a wrong detour. In those cases the humans stopped using the assistance of the algorithm because they felt it wasn’t trustworthy.

What’s fascinating to me is that I had this same conversation with a human the day before. Someone mentioned they were working with a group and they misstated something. After that, the group stopped listening to all this person’s advice, thinking it was all suspect. Essentially one mistake overrides everything else.

Trust is a funny thing. It takes time to earn and gain trust from others, and it can be lost quickly with an action. Trust is a reliance, a belief, a confidence in something or someone. The way the GenAI is framed, and the way a system is presented to a user can have a huge impact on the level of trust we give to an GenAI-system. Tell someone the system is trusted or others are using it raises trust. Tell someone to be wary, and they’ll trust the system less.

I find that GenAIs are unreliable but not completely. They are trustworthy in some ways, but not in others. There are a few variations in the article (and in other places) that note that GenAIs are helpful, but we need to review their work. Essentially trust but verify, which isn’t a bad policy for any interaction with humans or AI systems. We learn to trust our co-workers, but that takes time. Some we might never trust and always review their work, while others we accept what they give us with minimal review.

It’s interesting to see such a wide variety of responses to the usefulness of GenAI systems. Some people find them amazing, some find them useless, some use them daily for small things, some never bother to submit a prompt. I find myself cautiously using them more and more, especially my local models, trying out different prompts in different areas. One thing I got out of the article is I ought to have more conversations with the GenAI, much as I would with a co-worker. I’ll try to do that more in the future and see how it goes…

In the meantime, how much do you trust AIs, other computer systems, or coworkers?

Steve Jones

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

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

February 24, 2025
A Little Brainstorming with an AI

I was asked to do some a little thinking and brainstorming recently. Rather than send some emails or get on a call, I decided to ask my local AI a few things. This talks about the responses and reactions from my local DeepSeek AI..

This is part of a series of experiments with AI systems.

Requests for Feedback

I’m a part a research group that is trying to learn how to work better with others inside or outside of an organization. As a part of this, I was asked for some questions we might use to survey people on how they work as a baseline.

I was a little stumped on where to start. I had some ideas, but everything sounds to vague or too specific and I felt as though I couldn’t find a good place to start. So, I decided to ask my AI.

I have a DeepSeek model running in a container, so I opened my browser and asked this question: What are some questions I can ask employees to understand if they collaborate well with others?

The response was interesting. DeepSeek tries to give you some insight into how it approaches the problem. The initial responses showed a little stream-of-consciousness that reminded me of someone thinking out loud. Here’s the first part:

Okay, so I need to figure out how to determine what questions to ask when employees work together. I’m not really sure where to start, but maybe I should break it down step by step.

First, I think about why we’re asking these questions. If it’s to understand collaboration, then we want to know if the team is working well together, communicating effectively, or if there are areas they’re struggling with. So, what kinds of questions would help us assess that?

I remember reading somewhere about gathering feedback from employees. Maybe those are good ones because they can show how each person feels about the group’s work. But how exactly do I phrase that? Like, “How have you felt about the team’s performance so far?” or something along those lines.

Then there’s communication style. If an employee doesn’t contribute much in the moment, maybe asking them to describe what went on before they spoke would help identify if their approach is effective or not. It sounds a bit direct, but it might reveal issues like being quiet when someone speaks up later.

Collaboration skills are another area. I think it’s important that employees know how to work with others, so asking specific questions about group processes and roles could be useful. Maybe something like, “What do we use for planning meetings?” or, “How often do you give feedback within a week?”

From there it had more explanation and then it said “consider the following structured approach:” and it gave me a set of bullets, which you can see some of in the image below.

This wasn’t quite what I was looking for, but it did get me thinking and helped me send a list of possible questions to the group to consider. This was as helpful as if I’d have called someone, but way quicker and I didn’t interrupt anyone else.

I was genuinely pleased by the way this went.

A Recommendation Letter

I had an author ask me for a recommendation letter. This has happened in the past and I’ve written a few of them, but I always struggle to get one written that sounds professional and not like I’m a clown of a DBA/Editor who wears Hawaiian shirts to professional events.

Again, I decided to ask DeepSeek to outline one, giving it the title of an article. It had a few suggestions and then gave me a draft. My prompt was: draft a reference letter for XXX YYY for the article: ipsem lorum ipse lore.

First I got the thinking, making sure I was considering the aspects of the article, should I point out some technical things in my recommendation. It also thinks about including the impact of the article as well. Next, I got a draft with some “insert name” and “insert date” places.

I then added another prompt noting this was for SQL Server Central, which is a respected and long-lived (24 years now) publication well read in the industry. DeepSeek then adjusted its thinking, noting that we want to include info about SSC, how we review articles, etc. This was the end of the thinking, which I really liked. It’s the type of thing a human might say to let me know what they’re going to do:

The draft letter is still a little off, with too much praise for me. This is a good article, but it’s not amazing. In any case, this gave me a decent first draft I could edit and then send off to the author.

It’s not that I couldn’t have done this, but this draft saved me some time and allowed me to clarify my own thinking about what I actually wanted to write.

I think this is slightly better or worse than if I’d asked a human to help give me a draft. Some people might have given me a slightly better draft, some worse, but I’d still be adjusting the tone and editing the content. I know because I’ve used humans for this exact task before.

This was interesting to me to play with an LLM and look for help. On balance, this didn’t take long and I think I did get some help from an AI. It didn’t do my work, but it helped.

February 17, 2025