Tag: career

I’m sure many of you see surveys that note IT job growth is up 30%. Or that executives want to hire 20% more people. Or that the market dictates that salaries will be going up 12%.

Those are exciting numbers, and I see them too. However I saw a great post that summed up the fact that those are just quotes, perhaps even desires, but not necessarily realities. This answer notes that what we want and what we’ll pay for are often two different things.

Many IT executives would like to hire more staff. They know that there’s a backlog in IT that can be reduced with additional staff. They might also believe that hiring more staff increases the chances of talented staff that can produce higher quality work, playing a game of numbers. They also know that newer hardware or software technologies can often produce better results for the organization.

However whatever their beliefs, they will often be constrained by budgets. There are always going to be other priorities in an organization that compete for additional resources. Sometimes IT will get what they want; sometimes they won’t. Often the end result will be less than they want, but more than other groups would have spent on technology.

The surveys and quotes we see published, good or bad, aren’t worthless. They’re often a reflection of a best case hope, like so many of the estimates that developers give about their work. The numbers can indicate a trend, but take them with a grain of salt. Apply a little skepticism and treat them like averages. Remember, an average of 50 can come from 49 and 51 or from 1 and 99, both pairs of numbers reflecting different realities. Above all remember that an average or ideal also doesn’t necessarily reflect what you, personally, will experience in your career.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.3MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. 

It’s interesting to think about the role of the DBA and how it might evolve in the future. I regularly see predictions about the DevOps movement, and increasing ability of fewer staff to manage larger scales of systems (more systems or more data). There is also the fundamental way in which larger “cloud” type providers (inside your organization or third parties) can include features or services that reduce the need for DBAs.

However I ran across a statement that I think certainly provides some view into how the DBA might be affected in the future. The statement was: “The more an organization values its data, the more the DBA is under pressure to provide access to this data.” That includes all the people working with and managing data, whether developers, sysadmins or dedicated DBAs. They must ensure the data is available and useful to clients.

I’m sure many people unconsciously realize this is their role, but they sometimes get caught up in looking at performance, or normalization, or backups, or some other task as being the highest priority task. In reality, we must continue to ensure backups are available if we need them, and systems perform well, and all the other ancillary tasks, but remember that backups and tuning and everything else are tasks needed in support of making data available for users.

More and more I really believe that anybody that functions as a data professional, whether that is a small part of their job or all they do, needs to keep this fact in mind. The data is the more important asset we work with and all our efforts need to be geared towards helping our users access in as many ways as possible.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.1MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. 

Many of us have spent years learning about technology. I suspect that many of you might enjoy these pieces I write, but you visit SQLServerCentral for the same reason I started building it: to become better at your jobs. Many of you work regularly to improve your ability to make SQL Server perform as well as possible.

I’m also sure many of you have had to deal with what you see as “bad decisions” from your management at some point. I’m sure many of you have felt that if we did something a little differently, or spent a bit more money (or time), we could have built a better application. That may be true, though I’ve found over the years that technologists sometimes don’t make better decisions than project managers. We often have different priorities, but also different views on what success means.

There are always constraints involved with building systems. The most successful technologists I know may gripe about constraints, but it’s a passing comment. They don’t get bogged down in the limitations that are imposed on them. They move forward, deal with the constraint, and make things happen. They get the software working or the system running.

Like many things in life that may irritate us, and potentially hold us back, the limitations will always exist. We need to accept the lack of staff, money, time, or even technology and do the best with what’s available. It’s fine to disagree and complain, but don’t let that hold you back from making the best of the reality that you work within.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 1.9MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.