Tag: career

While on vacation recently, I went to see Spider-Man Homecoming with my family. It was an enjoyable movie on a rainy afternoon, and a nice addition to the Marvel lineup. I think this actually might be my favorite Spider-man movie, and I’d recommend you watch it if you enjoy this genre. It was humorous, well written, and some nice special effects. As with any of these Marvel movies, you definitely need some suspension of disbelief, especially with the technology.

In the movie, Peter Parker is anxious to join the Avengers and become a full time super hero, going on missions that have a large impact in the world. He chafes as the idea that he needs to stay in school and let his life progress at a more normal pace, which Tony Stark seems intent on pushing. Many of us have felt the same chafing in our own youth, wanting to get out of school, go to work, and move on in life.

However, even in our careers, I find people wanting to jump forward, moving to new technologies and platforms as quick as possible. I certainly see this in the SQL Server world, often from developers, that want to find the holy grail of database storage in CouchDB, CosmosDB, Neo4J, etc. I’ve often seen this in the development world with different types of technologies, such as web frameworks. Maybe we in the data space are more conservative? Or we like sticking to what we know works well?

We data professionals are not immune from the desire to jump ahead. I see plenty of data people wanting to jump into some new area to grow their careers. Data Science ( and AI, Machine Learning, etc.) is the newest craze, with quite a few people learning some R, some model training, and wanting to find a use for their skills. Or maybe an employer, preferably one that pays more than they make now. Good luck to you, but I’d encourage you to remember that good data science takes lots of skill, knowledge, and practice. I wouldn’t expect a quick jump into this new area.

There are certainly other changes in the data world, such as the graph capabilities coming to SQL Server 2017 and the explosion of cloud database implementations. However, don’t get caught up in expecting quick changes in your job or your income. Continue to learn, experiment, build a POC and practice your skills. Change usually comes for most of us at measured paces. This pace is hard to accept if you don’t have the habit of regularly learning something and applying it in small doses, understanding that not everything you learn will be useful (or used) in your current situation.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

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This editorial was originally published on Aug 19, 2013. It is being re-run as Steve is away at the Data Platform Summit.

When you work with a vendor, you may report bugs, issues, or strange behaviors in software. These area facts, and are valuable pieces of information that vendors do care about. When you exclaim that a particular bug or missing feature is critical, you’re stating an opinion. The importance or priority you place on an item is not necessarily the same priority the vendor places on the item.

We see this every day in our work, as clients and customers send us issues with our applications and systems. We triage the items and may or may not fix them in the order the customer would like them fixed. Our management may set priorities that we don’t agree with. It’s a complex interaction that involves many factors, all of which are weighed differently by different people.

However the end user (client, customer, etc.) often doesn’t understand why the priorities are different and why can’t we just see how badly an item needs to be fixed? I see this all the time, though from the end user perspective. I use lots of software, and I find lots of issues and failings, especially in SQL Server. My priorities aren’t Microsoft’s priorities, and I accept that. I provide them with an opinion of what I think, not a vote. If they don’t agree with my opinion, or choose to work on other priorities, I don’t think they aren’t listening to me. I think they disagree with my opinion.

Like it or not, politics is important here. The art of influence is important, and while an individual opinion doesn’t matter, lots of opinions can have influence. Again, however, these are opinions and influences, not votes. We can convince Microsoft to change direction at times, or work on certain issues, but it takes participation and rational, reasonable debate, not childish exaggerated complaints and insults. We want to influence and convince, not upset and anger.

Steve Jones

This editorial was originally published on Jul 22, 2013. It is being re-run as Steve is on vacation.

I wrote recently about tech interviews and hiring, and even on an interesting interviewing technique for senior people. However we need to hire more than just senior people. We need to hire junior people, and intermediate people. Those roles are important for both growing the experience of your staff, and not getting caught with a “” as a bottleneck or single point of failure. No, that’s not Brent Ozar, though someone with his talent might be the single point of failure in many organizations.

Not everyone can be a superstar-expert-architect that decides how the system is built. Not all architects should spend time coding basic insert/update/delete code or adding clustered indexes to tables. We need a variety of talent levels that can get complete different types of tasks. There is tedious administrative work, supporting roles, necessary, though unexciting work like reviewing security, logs, audits, and more. While you can automate much of this busy work, there are still tasks that we must assign to people.

There’s another consideration as well in hiring that all too often people overlook. Hiring too many people that are too similar, who may think alike, who may view problems the same way can lead to an environment that doesn’t grow and expand, that loses it’s creativity over time. There’s a great quote that says “Where all men think alike, no one thinks very much” (Walter Lippmann). It’s important to have a diversity of opinions, and when you hire new people, you should consider this. You want talented people, and people that get along, but not necessarily all thinking about problems in the same way.

The world is a richer place for the diversity we have, and varying opinions, thoughts and ideas. We don’t all get along, but many of us can work together with mutual respect, considering each others’ viewpoints as we work to build solutions to the problems we face.

Steve Jones