Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

The Return to the Office Debate

At the end of last year, I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen in a long time. We were chatting and this person mentioned that they were looking for a new job. They had been laid off and needed something. This is someone with a lot of experience and skill, so I wasn’t worried for their career or future. At the time, they mentioned they had gotten an introduction and interest from Amazon, but they weren’t interested in a position because of the return-to-the-office (RTO) mandate that Amazon was implementing.

I was recently chatting with another friend at a different company. This person manages a tech team, and was looking to hire another data engineer, but was told they could only hire in a certain city (City A) in the US. In this case, it was the city with their main office. They have offices in a few cities, and a large one in City B, but the organization has been thinking of their own RTO plans and has limited hiring. My friend is now wondering if they need to consider moving to City A (not likely) or find a new job. They don’t want to have to go to the office every day in City B.

Over the last five years, we went through a pandemic where many people moved to remote work. As we’ve come out of that ordeal, lots of organizations have questioned how to structure their workforce moving forward. Some want to have their staff in the office, some want to remain remote, and there are lots of reasons behind each approach. There is evidence that people can be productive remotely, and there is evidence that groups can be productive when they are co-located together. Inside most companies, there are wide-ranging opinions and desires on office work, from both management and workers, and there is no consensus on what works best.

Tech professionals certainly can work remotely. They can also see benefits from being in the same office. The efficiency of their work habits can vary depending on the day and situation, so it’s not easy to decide how remote or how in-person someone should be, even week to week. It might depend on the job and tasks. I enjoy my commute down the stairs each day, but I also find the office invigorating. I like going to the office, and I think I’d go every day if my job required it. I’d get less done for the company each week, but I’d do it.

How do you feel about remote work vs in office work vs hybrid? Do you have mandates? Would you look for another job? These are questions I see many people asking themselves these days as executives start to make new rules about their workforce. I don’t know there’s any good answer, but I am curious what many of you think. Leave a comment in the discussion below.

Steve Jones

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April 23, 2025
Staying Employed

The revolution with GenAI has been quite the ride since 2023 and quite a few people have been concerned that their employment status might be in jeopardy. I can certainly understand that, especially in light of the tight budgets, widespread layoffs, and executive views on AI technologies.

There was an article recently talking about AI taking over some jobs with a few tips on how to stay employed. While tech workers weren’t mentioned as being vulnerable, repetitive data-heavy jobs, such as data entry clerks, telemarketers, and cashiers were. That last one is interesting. Lots of companies have tried to use automated checkout stations, but this hasn’t necessarily eliminated cashiers. Maybe there are fewer, but lots of companies in the US have rolled back some of these efforts as fraud, mistakes, and slower checkouts have been an issue.

The data-heavy group might include ETL developers for sure. I suspect this is an area AI is well suited to help build flows, map data, and handle updates more easily. This won’t eliminate the need for an ETL developer, but it might reduce the number needed and certainly reduce the skill level required to code data movement scripts.

There are lots of jobs that might not be vulnerable, including tech people who work on AI, cybersecurity people, and others. I think DBAs aren’t likely to go, though perhaps we will need fewer DBAs and developers over time as AI models become more capable of repeating work.

The tips for navigating this new world aren’t anything different than my advice for years. Improve your skills, both technical and soft. Learn new technologies, but more importantly, show that you add business value with your work. Don’t depend on someone else to tell you what to do. Learn what things are important to your boss and organization and tackle those things early and often. Work to be an effective and efficient worker wherever you can and learn about your business. Those skills and that knowledge make you more valuable than most AI models.

Steve Jones

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

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

April 21, 2025
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
Widespread New Technology Adoption

This week I saw an article at Ars Technica that noted in 2025 that electrical vehicle sales had increased 28% in the US. That’s quite a level of growth in adoption of this technology, especially given how set in their ways the US can be and how often these transition away from ICE vehicles has been politicized.

I’ve had a Tesla for a little over 3 years and I think it’s the best and most fun car I’ve over owned. The technology and convenience are amazing, and I still enjoy driving the car around. For the most part I don’t have range anxiety, though I recently skipped using it on a weekend trip. The car has proven to be very inexpensive to operate and I wouldn’t hesitate to purchase another EV.

Apparently lots of other people feel the same, though not everyone. About 75% of new vehicles sold are still ICE vehicles, which I completely understand. Not everyone has access to regular charging at home and the cost of these vehicles, while only slightly more than ICE ones, is still much higher to start. That hasn’t stopped many people from evaluating and choosing to purchase a car that runs on battery technology. However, plenty of people just don’t want to adopt new technology.

I see the same thing in the tech industry. GenAI has been quite the disrupter the last few years, but many people don’t trust models and don’t want to try to use them. I’ve also seen many people who blindly trust this new technology, which can be even worse.

I’ve seen the same type of attitude in the past with DevOps, PowerShell, NoSQL and other technologies. Many people are slow to adopt new technology, for a variety of reasons. It might be they aren’t sure the technology really offers any improvement, which is understandable. After all, if something new doesn’t actually provide significant benefits, is it worth an investment? After all the investment is a cost and there are likely some downsides.

There are other people who are resistant to any change or unmotivated to bother, preferring to stick with what they know and are comfortable with using. I don’t quite understand this view, as it’s entirely possible we originally learned a poor way of doing things. It’s also likely that as technology changes, there are improvements made from our learnings in the industry. Certainly doctors, mechanical engineers, architects, lawyers, and more adopt new practices because their professions evolve and move in new ways, so why should technology professionals be different?

I’d like to think that the reason many people don’t bother to learn new (or improve existing) skills or adopt new tools is that they don’t have time. We’re all under pressure to get work done, and often without any planning for our various administrative work and meetings, let alone time to invest in ourselves. However, I will say that finding a way to carve out time to read, experiment, and practice skills has helped me improve my own career prospects, as well as helped me convince employers to match my investment with their own time, resources, and funding.

Steve Jones

March 15, 2025