Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Development Is Fun

    I was listening to The Pragmatic Engineer interview Casey Muratori about high-performance code, which I found really interesting. I’m actually considering going through his Performance Aware Programming series and (re)learning some assembly. I never thought I’d even consider doing that. I learned Assembly in high school and university, and I didn’t enjoy it.

    Casey is a game programmer, and there was a question in the interview about how he uses AI tools in his work. “We are not using them” was not the answer I expected. Perhaps even more interesting was the rest of the answer. Casey loves programming and wants to enjoy what he does. He writes the code because he wants to do the work. If he didn’t, he’d license some game engine or technology, not spend time getting an AI to do the work.

    It’s an interesting interview, but it made me wonder how many people out there enjoy their work. How many want to go to work and get things done? Certainly, people want to get paid, but I would hope a lot of you have a job you enjoy doing, and aren’t necessarily looking to get someone, or something, to do the work for you.

    And how many go primarily because they have bills and need the paycheck? Would you rather be doing something else if you didn’t need the money?

    I love solving problems with customers, testing technology, and puzzling over the approaches to take when confronted with a challenge. I enjoy going to work, and while the paycheck matters, I like doing the work. I have no interest in retiring from my current job, as it’s fun. It’s hard some days, but mostly it’s fun.

    Do you still enjoy writing code? Or configuring and tuning servers? Or whatever you do? Are you looking forward to the day when you don’t have to do this job anymore?

    I don’t expect many people to comment unless they enjoy their jobs, but if you do, let me know.

    Steve Jones

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  • Get Along

    I enjoy listening to Get Along by Kenny Chesney periodically, often smiling to myself. I was reminded of this song recently while talking about careers and the AI impact during VSLive San Diego.

    On one hand, most of the people I surveyed or chatted with were using AI to accomplish some tasks. However, very few are using it in a way that would eliminate their positions or do the majority of their work. On the third hand, lots of them worry about their organizations attempting to get by with more AI and less humans in the future.

    I think that last one is a natural point of view in the world today. I’m sure plenty of executives are hoping they can reduce their future labor costs with machine assistance. Quite a few are finding that the machine assistance isn’t that cheap, and humans are still needed. I don’t know where this will shake out in the future, but I guess that many of our organizations will shrink a bit and use less developers than they might have now. I also think there will still be plenty of developer jobs, but AI will be used judiciously to supplement the capabilities of workers.

    This means workers will need to know how to work with AI effectively and efficiently.

    Perhaps there will be new departments and new companies that spring up and create the need for more workers. I hope that’s the case, but I bet a lot of teams will lose some humans and replace them with AI. The cost of benefits continues to rise, and I don’t know that many companies will grow their businesses enough to keep all their humans and spend on AI. That’s adding lots of salary/token costs because of growth. Some organizations will have a lot of growth, but I suspect many companies will see that they have tasks that need humans and tasks that don’t.

    The common question from our discussions was “which humans will stick around?”

    Technical competency isn’t likely to be the deciding factor. You being a 10x engineer or the best coder might not keep you around. Spotting problem code and better guiding AIs will matter. The mentorship skills you use with junior staffers, and the patience, will become important. Some people are learning those skills now.

    The one thing most people agree on is that you should get along well with others. Those soft skills – the ability to communicate, being pleasant, making others feel not only comfortable but wanting to work with you – will matter most. If others don’t enjoy collaborating with you, especially your boss, I can see your position being precarious and potentially slotted for a layoff.

    This isn’t to say you can’t argue a point of view or debate an approach. The thing you should remember is that when you do present your view, it is seen as an engaging and spirited debate, not an antagonistic war. People want to work with others when they feel some bond with them. When they don’t, they might be indifferent or even dread interactions. Feeling dread, hesitation, or a reluctance to engage is a sign that someone isn’t a part of a team.

    Those who aren’t part of the team might be the easiest to replace with an agent in the future.

    Steve Jones

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

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

  • The End of Summer

    Growing up, this was the last week of summer for me every year. When I was a child in Virginia Beach, school started the day after Labor Day every year, which is next Monday in the US. This was our last chance to sleep in, enjoy the ocean, and stay out late without commitments. Starting next week we’d be back in school, up early, with homework to do every night.

    As an adult, the end of summer doesn’t really stand out anymore. Corporate changes are usually at the beginning of the year or in July, so it’s the end of June or December that are slower times. September is often the beginning of conference season for me, and I’ve usually been preparing for travel in September, as I am this year. I’ll be in San Diego in a little over a week for VS Live (if you want to join me, use the code Jones).

    I hope that most people have busy times and slow times at work. If you’re constantly busy and fighting fires, life is not good. That leads to stress, unhealthy living, and burnout. It’s not sustainable over time, at least not if you want to keep producing high quality work. I’ve lived in those situations and they’re neither enjoyable, nor the times when I’ve been at my most effective.

    When work is slower, I naturally slow down a little and appreciate that I can take more time to write, answer emails and messages with more detail, and think more carefully about situations. I also use the time to get ahead administrative tasks that I sometimes put off. For me, this is producing and scheduling things I’ll need later. This is often a time when I’ll write questions or editorials for the future.

    These are often the pieces I’m more pleased or proud of. I have time to work through details and spend more time reviewing my work. These are often the best questions I write.

    As a developer, this was the time I might refactor code I’m not pleased with, or tackle some niggling piece of work that I know is needed, but never has priority. As a DBA, this is when I refactor scripts and alerts, do more maintenance, maybe add some automation for tasks that I’ve just been doing manually because I don’t have time to do anything else. If I were  still a dev or DBA, this is when I’d be experimenting and practicing using AI as a lever to make myself more effective.

    When you have slower times, what tasks do you tackle? Documentation? Improvements? What else might not get done when the pace is a little more hectic? Let me know today.

    Steve Jones

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

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

  • A Challenge of Our Knowledge

    AI is here to stay. It will evolve, it will get better at some things, and we might decide that it’s not good for certain tasks. It’s a weird, new, different technology that somehow seems magic, extremely intelligent, and at times as dumb as a box of rocks. It can do things that I could never do, or would never do, for myself. Heck, I’m not sure I could or would pay someone to do this by hand. Yet this was less than a minute for a computer system to take this image and transform it into something fun.

    Christian Buckley wrote an interesting post about AI challenging our identity, which sums up nicely one of the struggles many of us have with AI. Many of us identify with our work. We spend most of our lives for decades toiling away at a craft that we (hopefully) enjoy and in which we have success. We build skills, and we’re proud of our accomplishments.

    Some of us are more proud of our scars.

    Either is OK, but AI challenges that. AI can do work in seconds that we used to take minutes, often tens of minutes. Sometimes hours. It can remember things that we spend time googling or looking up in SQL Server Central forums. Our ability to search and navigate docs for an obscure setting, like that strange exit code you found in your CI/CD pipeline. We’re proud of where we’ve been and what we’ve done.

    I wrote recently about experts wanting to still solve problems themselves, without AI assistance. Some people don’t embrace AI because they think it devalues their knowledge. Others are afraid of the technology and potentially making mistakes with code an AI wrote that they don’t understand. They see this as a risk (and they should).

    However, choosing not to use the technology at all, or not trying to learn how and when to use it, is a mistake. We need to embrace the tools in our world, learning to take advantage of them.

    And more importantly, show our current and future employers we can do so.

    AI does challenge us. It challenges the way we used to work and some of the skills we used to rely on. We have to learn to flow with this challenge and make it a part of our future career.

    Steve Jones

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

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