Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Grinding Away: Kobe Bryant

    I saw this story from Robert Horry, one of the greatest clutch shooters in basketball. Don’t know it’s true, but I think it is.

    When I got traded to the Lakers in ’97, Kobe Bryant was just a rookie. The dude couldn’t shoot threes. We would play this shooting game every day after practice. It was me, Kobe, Brian Shaw, Mitch Richmond and Kurt Rambis. Kobe would lose every time. We would get to practice the next day and sure enough, Kobe would already be there shooting nothing but threes. Like clockwork, at the end of practice he’d say, “Let’s play the game! I’m ready for you.” And we would beat his ass again.

    He would never stop. It was incredible. He practiced until one day, a couple months later, he finally won. If you literally said, “Kobe, I bet you can’t make five in a row by dropping the ball and kicking it in from half court,” that motherfucker would go out there and practice it until he could do it. And that’s what people don’t understand when they talk about champions — when they talk about a winner’s mentality. Kobe’s dedication to the game is unreal.

    In case you think this isn’t true, listen to Kobe in this interview.

    Why I like this

    To compete against others, you have to work harder. I tell kids I coach that it isn’t enough to get better in sports, but you have to get better faster than others are getting better. That takes work, it takes setbacks, it takes failures. It takes effort to overcome those to get better.

    You might not have the raw talent to be one of the best every in your area, but you can be really, really good, and you can compete with many others.

    The modern world, with jobs being remote, companies hiring everywhere, more tech people wanting jobs, you need to compete well, which means work.

    Work to improve.

    Why I don’t like this

    I do think that Kobe worked in a very narrow domain, playing his sport. His sport didn’t change much, and he just needed to improve his skills, while knowing how to work against others. He was competing in a narrower space, against many knowns.

    For many of us, our world is more complex, with many more dimensions of new technologies, unknown demands or desires from employers (or potential employers), and an every growing set of things that appear in our industry.

    Driving to continue to be better is good, but you’ll never get to be amazing in everything in tech, or even one platform. Keep some balance and remember there are other important things in your life. Not so important you shouldn’t improve, but important enough to require some of your time.

  • Grinding Away: Michael Jordan

    A story from Tim Grover, who was Michael Jordan’s trainer when he was with the Chicago Bulls. I don’t know this is true, but I saw this story posted and I like it (and don’t like it).

    “After every game, I used to ask Michael one question: 5, 6, or 7? As in, what time are we hitting the gym tomorrow morning? And he’d snap back the time, and that was it. Especially after a loss, when there wasn’t a whole lot else to say.

    No discussion, no debate, no lame attempt to convince me he needed the morning off. ‘Are you good?’ ‘I’m good.’ ‘See you in the morning.’ And the next morning, at whatever time he’d decided, he’d awaken to find me standing outside his door.

    No matter what happened the night before—good game, bad game, soreness, fatigue—he was up working out every morning while most other guys slept. Interesting how the guy with the most talent and success spent more time working out than anyone else.”

    Grinding away, getting better at your craft, is something that all of us can do. Whether we want to or not is a separate story.

    Why I like this

    There aren’t excuses for continuing to work on your craft and it takes regular attention. It requires some dedication and commitment to improve.

    Why I don’t like this

    It’s easy to take this to far and think the routine of every day or every week is important. It’s also easy to drive yourself too far. If you want to be the rest of the best, then you need this drive.

    If you don’t want to be the best, but just be really good, then you need to do this often, but give yourself a break at times when life gets in the way.

  • I Need a CS Degree. I Don’t Need a CS Degree

    For a long time I’ve felt that my recommendation for people wanting to enter technology wasn’t to go to college and get a degree, but rather start to learn on your own and get an entry level job (help desk, tech support, etc.) and start to work in the industry. That’s a good way to both experiment and understand what you’re considering undertaking as a career, as well as limiting your investment. It’s also nice to get paid to learn something.

    College is great, but it’s also expensive. I find that for many people, it can be hard to get a good ROI from college these days. The fast rising cost, not to mention the uncertain opportunities after college lead me not to recommend pursuing a CS degree, or really any degree, as a default view. There are exceptions, but for many people, I’d prefer to work and try to better understand where they should invest in education.

    However.

    Jerry Nixon has a great (long) post on Twitter on this topic, answering the question of whether someone should get a degree or not, mostly focused on developers and CS degrees. It’s a very nuanced view that you both should and shouldn’t get a degree. It really depends on what you want to do. There are cases where we might want someone to get a degree and deeply understand complex development. It’s one thing to build internal web apps or design a database used by internal sales teams. It’s quite another to design encryption for a military application or ensure a rocket can land on a floating platform.

    Both things can be true together. You should get a degree to be a developer and you should not get a degree to be a developer, but the more detailed answer depends on where you want to work and what you want to achieve. A nice optimistic view from Jerry is that some people want to achieve something bigger than a paycheck, bettering the world with software, not to earn more, but to make life better in some way. I wish more people felt that way.

    A great piece of advice from Jerry is to listen to those who you want to become, not the loudest people. I somewhat lament that so many of the very, very smart people I know or hear about are focused on tooling that generates revenue or income, and not necessarily pursuing improvements in the world. That’s their choice, and I can’t get upset about so many extremely capable technologists working in finance or FAANG rather than areas where they might change the world for the better. I can be though, and am, sad.

    Read the post, and think deeply about what this means to you. And if you want to be a great software or database engineer, then do great things. Work hard at your craft and constantly sharpen your saw.

    Steve Jones

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

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

  • Knowing Your Total Reward

    For much of my career as a younger person, I was mostly concerned with salary at a job, along with the opportunities for my career. I really wanted to know how much money would hit my bank account and cared most about that. I also wanted to know if I would learn something or get a better title or work with a technology that might help me in the future. That drove me through quite a few jobs in my 20s and 30s, leaving some for more money and more opportunity.

    As I got a family, I became more concerned about healthcare since that industry is a mess in the US. Often when I looked at a job, I perused other benefits but didn’t give them much weight, mostly concerned with salary and the cost of medical insurance. I also somewhat cared about who I worked with (the team), but that was more for helping me choose between different jobs. It wasn’t something I thought of as a reward, though I should have.

    Recently one of our internal recruiters shared a post on LinkedIn talking about total reward. This was from an HR company, but I really liked the idea of total reward. There’s not a lot to the post, but it noted that many HR and management think total rewards for employees are salary + benefits. It highlights that there is more, which includes all compensation (competitive + performance-based), work-life integration, career opportunities, supportive culture, and human-centric policies. There’s a graphic that highlights this idea.

    Early in the SQL Server Central days, Andy and I were talking about his job search and how he viewed the entire package. He cared about other things, often looking at certification or education compensation, time off, commute, and more. Some of those things were important to me, but they often were nice-to-haves next to the salary. The total compensation made more sense for him to evaluate, as employers sometimes have very different policies. He tried to put a monetary value on each benefit to compare them. He had one company that paid him for each certification he got, which added up to quite a bit of money on top of his salary when he got certified in most of the Office products.

    Today I’m wondering if some of you think about your total reward from employment. Do you weigh in the different types of benefits you get? Can you put some value on a particular policy your employer offers? As an example, I made this choice years ago when a company in Denver offered me a fair salary and position. However, they were unwilling to let me work at home more than one day a week. At the time I had young children and I would lose 90 minutes every day to a commute. I countered with $15k less salary each year and 3 days of work at home. They declined and we went our separate ways. I was very happy with that decision, as my time had real value to me.

    These days I think about the total compensation I get, with a lot of flexibility and autonomy, on top of interesting work and good compensation. I also think about stability and security, which are important to me since I really, really don’t ever want to have to look for another job.

    We should work to live our lives, and understand that while work is important and provides purpose, it’s a part of our life. We spend a lot of time in our jobs, so we should ensure our total rewards are a fair trade for our time.

    Steve Jones

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

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