Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Testing Skills

    This editorial was originally published on May 11, 2009. It is being re-run as Steve is on vacation.

    How can you measure someone’s skills? Is there a good way to actually assess how well a DBA or developer will do in your company? If you have one, there is some money to be made by passing the information along.

    Traditional interviews where you ask lots of questions typically haven’t necessarily proven to be a great way to do this.  Some people give tests, but they often are thrown together, and might contain multiple choice answers to make them easy to grade. However the other day someone posted a technique they used that I liked.

    This person suggested that a VM be configured with Windows and SQL Server and then with a certain number of things wrong with the install. Or at least things that would be seen as wrong in that particular  environment. You then give it to a candidate and ask them to tell you what’s wrong. You could let them work through it in a stream of consciousness way, telling you what was wrong as they found it. You could also give them some time, say an hour, and then come back and let them explain what is wrong.

    Actually I’d recommend you give the candidate the choice since some people work better alone.

    I’ve thought about asking them to accomplish certain tasks before, but after considering this technique, I like it a bit more. Just asking them “what’s wrong?” or “what would you change?” is a good way to see how people think. Interacting with them, getting them to dig into a real system, is a great way to assess not only technical skills, but also some interaction. See how they debate, argue, or question a co-worker is important, at least it’s important to me.

    Is this is a better way to interview people and assess skills? Would you like to be interviewed like this? Maybe this would even be a fun competition at somewhere like the PASS Summit.

    Steve Jones

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  • Time for Learning

    Working in technology means that we are constantly challenged to learn new skills and improve our existing ability to get work done. When I started as a DBA, I could work within SQL Server, writing T-SQL, making backups, and managing security. As the product has evolved, I’ve needed to learn more about Active Directory to troubleshoot security, I’ve been called upon to cluster machines and implement replication. There are all sorts of areas in which I’ve found it important to develop some expertise.

    However time is short. With family, with work, with commitments in the rest of my life, how do I find time to work on improving my career skills? Most of the time has been spent at work, slipping in learning time during a project, but I’ve also had to spend some time at night, practicing skills or reading about the intricacies of some feature.

    Andy Warren has estimated that it really takes around 100 hours to develop some level of competence with a new skill. That’s 100 hours in a year, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but dedicating two hours a week to your career can be challenging. It’s much less than the 10,000 estimate for expertise, which is good since most of us can’t spare that much time to become an expert.

    However is 100 hours too many? There was a TED talk that noted you could learn a new skill, at an acceptable level in 20 hours. I’m skeptical that this is true, and I’d certainly point out that there is prep time to analyze a skill, learn something about it, and then build the plan to learn. Those items alone could take much more than 20 hours.

    I’m not sure what a good level is, but I’m thinking to try this in my life in some area and see what 20 hours gets me. I’m also on a Powershell Challenge, which will probably end up being close to 30 hours, but I’ll see how comfortable I am with the skill after that time. However, do you think you could learn something like Powershell in 20 hours?

    Steve Jones

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  • Powershell in a Month – Day 2, Help

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

    Today was Chapter 3, Using the Help System. Another not-so-exciting topic, but one that does matter. There are a ton of commands to learn and use in PoSh and being able to get help on them is important if you are to develop code with any level of speed. Note I said code. This is scripting, it’s interactive, but it’s code. Whether you run it once or save it and schedule executions every minute, it’s code.

    The first point in the chapter is to RTFM, or “read the friendly manual”. The authors emphasize that using Google instead of help means you’re copying code, not learning about the code, and potentially stunting your development or even wrecking your production system with commands you don’t understand. As much as I love Google, I can understand the point here.

    One of the first things the chapter does is ask you to update help. However that didn’t work for me:

    Posh_006

    The book doesn’t talk about the CLI v the ISE, which is the problem. I found a post on MSDN that noted this works from Powershell, but not the Powershell ISE.  Once I went to the CLI, it worked.

    Posh_005

    I used to do UNIX work, and was forever typing “Man xxx” to learn about xxx. MAN is a wrapper here, as is “help” for the get-help command. I played around with some get-help stuff, using wildcards and tab completion. Both of which are handy. I can definitely see that learning to use help and tab is important.

    The rest of the chapter brings out various ways in which you can use help, including getting more details, getting examples, and going to the online pages, which are more up to date than your local copy might be. All good tricks to getting going with PoSh. Lots of example commands showing how to get help, and I ran most of these.

    The chapter was boring, but at the end when I got to the lab, I was surprised how little I know. As I tried to go through the lab questions, I wasn’t sure what was working and what wasn’t. I didn’t know if I was actually running the right commands, since things like “help *array*” worked. There are answers you can download from the morelunches.com site, and once I did that, I was able to check my results, and get help on a few items I wasn’t sure about. 

    I was surprised that I learned a few things, and I can definitely see that working with help is both important, and cumbersome. For example, the scrolling isn’t smooth in the ISE and the MORE piping from the HELP wrapper doesn’t work. Definitely something to practice on as I move through the book.

  • Powershell in a month – Day 1

    I got started on Learn Windows Powershell 3 in a Month of Lunches at lunch one day. Working at home makes this easy as I have a computer and a kitchen near each other. In this case, a salad, a bowl of chili, and the laptop next to the book to get started. The picture below was post-chili.

    20131106_114540

    This is the first post in my Powershell challenge. I don’t expect to post every day as I travel, have vacation, etc, but I will post once for each of the days I work on this. At the end, I hope to have a couple PoSh presentations I’ll build as well as more incorporation of PoSh into my talks.

    Day 1

    I cheated slightly today. I read the first and second chapters here. The first was really a “how to use this book” and the second actually got me started. The first introduces what Powershell is, why it’s good, etc. It’s a good intro, but I’ve been through most of this before, I know something about the environment, and I’ve used it a bit for specific tasks. If you are new to PoSh, read this.

    I didn’t get much out of it, so I went into Chapter 2, despite the warning from the book not to do more than one a day. Instead, practice. I made an exception this first day.

    The second chapter gets you familiar with how to set up your environment. As it mentioned, PoSh gives you two ways to work with it on most modern OSes. The command line or the Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE). I tend to use the ISE, but you can choose. In this case, I popped both open. One note here, I’m on Win 8 and if I hit the Windows key and type “power”, I see this:

    Posh_001

     

    There’s no ISE available. This is different on different machines for me. However if I finish “Powershell” and add a space “i”, I get the ISE. Not a bid deal, but an interesting item for me.

    Posh_002

    The second chapter really goes into getting the environment set up first. Choose large fonts, which is a must for older folks like me. I definitely plan to make this a part of any presentations I do. The chapter also emphasizes that typing matters and accuracy is important. PoSh is case sensitive and different separators, like the various grouping items, matter. These:

    ([{<

    are all different and you can’t mix and match them. Make sure you know the difference. It’s especially try for the single quote (‘) and the backtick (`). Learn the difference.

    No scrolling was another important point since you can lose things on the screen. For me, I set the font to 18, left the default colors, and then in the ISE, removed the command window and script editor. That left me full screen with the interactive shell.

    Posh_003

     

    From there, I played a bit with the way PoSh works. Typing part of commands, and then using Tab or Shift+Tab to cycle through commands. Using these keys to get folders, or parameters, or choices, was handy.

    Nothing really executed today, but I did play with various commands to see what happened. The one thing I did run was

    Get-Service SQLAGENT

    I typed Get-s, hit tab to cycle through choices, and then entered “SQ” and tab’ed to get SQLAgent. That gave me the status of the service on my laptop.

    Posh_004

     

    That was the basic  learning for today. It’s simple, and a little boring, but it is stuff to know that will make future days easier and build some familiarity with the environments.

    Tomorrow, chapter 3.