Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Top Talent Leaves

    Derek Jeter will likely play his entire career with the New York Yankees. LeBron James has already left one team, and might leave another soon. Both are Hall of Fame players that have had extreme success in their chosen professions. They are recognized as some of the most talented players in their sports. Why did one stay and one leave? Probably for a variety of reasons, but it seems more and more that organizations are realizing there is some value in the retention of their players and are trying to find ways to improve their success at retention.

    In the business world outside of sports, we have much more freedom to change employers whenever we want. Most of us are glad we have that choice. Sometimes we move on when we don’t want to, but in the majority of cases I think technology workers leave companies because they aren’t happy about something.

    There was an article about why the top talent leaves a company and I think it presents a number of issues that many employees experience within their own organizations. People aren’t engaged, respected, valued, challenged, and more. In short, they really don’t like their jobs. Many of the issues are often easy to fix, but only if you could fix two of the major items mentioned (#7 and #10). Those are leadership issues, often systemic ones that occur when upper management doesn’t care about culture or doesn’t make an effort to hire and train good managers.

    I don’t know if I’d prefer to see people in technology working only a few jobs during their careers, spending decades at each, or if we are better workers with the exposure to differing environments and businesses. All I know is that I am glad that I’ve had the ability to leave bad jobs in the past, usually because of bad managers.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.5MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Mevio . feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • Powershell in a Month Day 15 – Jobs

    This is part of my Powershell Challenge, to learn more about PowerShell (PoSh) using the Learn Windows Powershell 3 in a Month of Lunches book by Don Jones.

    Jobs are important, mostly because running stuff interactively, and manually, is a pain. The real power of PoSh administration, in my mind, is that not only can I run things across lots of servers, but I can also have some jobs run automatically. The Windows Scheduler isn’t always a part of this, though I’m not sure the PoSh system is better after reading this chapter.

    It’s a short one, but one that I did like. I’ve always liked scheduling jobs and having them do work for me. I can see this being handy, but the processing of results is something that will be important. That means saving this stuff off and practicing formatting.

    It’s an interesting approach here. The chapter has you create some jobs and then it explains how they work. Getting results, stopping jobs, checking them, etc. all occur as you have jobs running. All good admin things. I have the feeling I’ll refer back here as I build jobs.

    The scheduling comes after there’s an explanation of jobs themselves. We learn briefly how to schedule, but not in detail. To be fair, there isn’t a lot to worry about here.

    The lab was fairly easy. Most of the items were things I know how to do from the past, or I learned here. The recursing into subdirectories was a little tricky since I’ve used “/s” forever, but I needed to understand in PoSH that -recurse and -filter were needed here.

    I’ll be looking to play with some scheduled jobs that might clear out old files on my machine, especially backups. This would be some good practice for a job. I certainly should create a job to trim out IIS log files since that’s something I’ve seen needed on every web server I’ve encountered.

  • Big Data Comes to Hiring

    I remember first seeing kiosks a few years back in some stores such as Best Buy, Target, Barnes and Nobles, etc. The devices had banners above them that invited people to apply for a job using the computerized system. This was just before my oldest son started applying for jobs, and shortly thereafter I found a few articles that stated quite a few of these large corporations were using the same company to manage the kiosks and pre-screen candidates. Not only were they considering the applications, but they were examining employment records, noting which candidates might have been terminated or left another job quickly. They were trying to use analytics to decide which applicants to interview.

    That entire process reminded me of the “black mark” on your record that I heard about as a kid. It was a reminder to not make too many mistakes, at least not serious ones, that might follow you forever. It appears now that it’s not just entry level jobs that are starting to use data and analysis for hiring decisions. It seems as though some companies are starting to evaluate candidates with different types of algorithms and applications for a wide range of positions. This piece from the Atlantic talks about the history of hiring and a few ways in which data is being gathered about workers and used to analyze their performance. Even more interesting the section about halfway down that talks about how they analyze developer’s work from afar.

    It’s expensive, time consuming, and stressful to hire people. We’ve proven in technology over and over that many of the hiring decisions made, aren’t made that well. We find talented people being underpaid and quick to leave, while other employees are overpaid and are happy to toil away in their positions for years. Neither situation is good for the employer, and often not good for the employee either. It’s less than motivating for any of us when we don’t find some challenge and enjoyment in our jobs.

    Ultimately I know more “people analytics” will be used in the hiring process by some companies, but I find that even with the data, there’s one thing that seems to matter more: personal referrals. Networking matters, and there is no shortage of companies that are placing lots of value on their employees’ networks. Some of them are even looking to conduct the majority of their hires through networking. So make sure you’re networking with others in technology. You never know when it will be the way you get your next job.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.8MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Mevio . feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • Powershell in a Month Day 14 – WMI

    This is part of my Powershell Challenge, to learn more about PowerShell (PoSh) using the Learn Windows Powershell 3 in a Month of Lunches book by Don Jones.

    Day 14 introduces us to Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). Since many people might not be familiar with WMI, the chapter spends a little time trying to help you understand what WMI is.

    I know what it is, I hate it, and I agree, it’s a PIA. It’s a mess, it’s inconsistent, and I’m not surprised the Powershell barely integrates with it. As with the cmdlets, this shows that there are the WMI cmdlets and the newer CIM cmdlets. The old ones like

    Get-WMIObject

    are somewhat deprecated. They work, but no development is being done. Instead, we need to use

    Get-CIMInstance

    That makes sense to me and I understand it. With no legacy work, I don’t think I have any issue with using Get-CIMInstance, though I do hate the idea of querying the WMI spaces. They’re a mess and nothing is intuitive.

    gwmi -class win32_bios -computer localhost,JollyGreenGiant | format-table @(l=’Host’;e={$_.__SERVER}

    There’s more to the table, but that’s all I typed in to test. I did a few more queries, with this and Get-CIMInstance to practice, but most of this chapter is really just understanding how WMI is organized to look for things and then formatting the results. Easy enough to do, a little boring, but good practice with expressions.

    The lab was annoying, mostly because it’s asking you to figure out which WMI classes to query. I googled around for some, and found them, but mostly this is annoying. I can certainly see where it’s handy to understand how WMI queries work, but like most people, I prefer to avoid them.

    Short chapter, easy, and good practice formatting things.