Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Job Worries over Automation

    There was a report recently where the NSA noted that they are reducing the number of system administrators by 90%. If the report is true, that would certainly worry many of the people in the technology industry. However I’m not sure that the quote given in the article means what it looks like at first.
    Much of the technology reports that we see aren’t completely true since many of the reporters aren’t that familiar with the details of how computer technology works. In this case, however, we have a quote: “What we’re in the process of doing – not fast enough – is reducing our system administrators by about 90 percent,” It might be hard to interpret this remark in any way other than the NSA is looking to reduce the number of people, but if you read further, the piece notes that the NSA is concerned about contractors, not necessarily FTEs. I suspect that any reduction in contractors employed by other companies will be made up by increased internal headcount.
    However even if the NSA can reduce the number of people needed to administer their systems, I’d suspect that means that they had too many people to begin with. The various reports of this story all talk about automation being used increasingly to handle the load of system work, but the idea that automation replaces people is a myth. Automation usually results in less growth of people, but rarely a reduction in staff.
    I’ve heard the concerns over automation replacing technology workers for decades (literally) and I’ve yet to see it happen. We have more technology workers than ever before, and no sign of there being less in the future. Your department might change, you might hire less, but there will be lots of jobs in technology for the foreseeable future. In other departments that might not be the case, but I bet you we’ll have system administrators, DBAs, and developers for a long, long time in most companies that have them today.
    Steve Jones

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  • Backups, Encryption and Branding in San Diego

    This weekend is SQL Saturday #249 in San Diego. I’m looking forward to the trip for a few reasons, but mostly because I used to live in the Northern San Diego area and love going back to spend time near the beach. I’m not sure what I’ll have time to do this trip, but since the event is in La Jolla, likely I’ll visit Del Mar, where I used to work and see some sights. A short run in the sand might also be required 😉

    I arrive Thursday because Red Gate Software is hosting a small event Friday with The DBA Team: Grand Fritchey and myself.  This is one of our mini SQL in the City seminars and is targeted to DBAs. We’ve done two so far in 2013, with (I believe) three more to come. I’ll be talking about backups this time while Grant covers monitoring and parameter sniffing. I’m not sure if we’re full, but if you can come, register and we’ll see you Friday.

    Saturday is the SQL Saturday event, at the UCSD Extension campus. I’ll be opening the day talking about encryption and then have the second session on branding yourself. I enjoy these two talks, and they’ve been popular at a number of events across the last couple of years.

    I’m hoping for good weather, especially after a rainy week in Denver.

  • Risk and Assumptions

    Today’s editorial was originally released on Jan 22, 2009. It is being re-published as Steve is on vacation.

    I was reading Buck Woody’s blog the other day and he had a post on Risk where he quoted Warren Buffet: “Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.” I think that’s true and that’s part of the reason we’d had issues in our financial markets over the last couple of years. It’s also the reason that we have issues in many of the systems that we build.

    Often the people building IT systems go through an extensive evaluation to determine the needs and wants of their users. It’s an attempt to identify exactly what to build so that the user is pleased, a good estimation can be made, and everyone finishes the project happy.

    And that almost never happens.

    There are people that are better at this than others, but the overall state of the software development process is pretty poor. That means that any project you undertake, or that your customers or clients ask you to undertake is fraught with risk. I can see why there are plenty of people that don’t want to hire contractors to get software built, or that our management doesn’t want to start new projects with their IT departments.

    I don’t have a solution, and I’m not completely sure where the problems lie, but I do know that as the economy slows, people have less tolerance for risk. That means less IT projects, and potentially the need for less IT staff and contractors. Which then contributes to the slowdown of the economy as there are less people at work.

    If I were working in IT or consulting right now, I would be working to lower risk as much as possible. Adopting techniques that you are confident in, learning new skills and then applying them, even in side projects, can help grow your skills, increase the chances of projects being completed that the client is happy with, and keeping you employed. Now is the time to reassess the way you work, and find ways to show that you can work with your clients to meet their needs in an efficient manner.

    Efficient in their eyes, not yours.

    Steve Jones

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  • The Future of Knowledge Measurement

    This is part 3 of a 3 part series of thoughts on certification and Microsoft technologies.

    We’ll never be able to completely and accurately measure a person’s skills in technology. At least not in any cost- and time-effective way. Ultimately we want to come up with some way to weed through candidates and ensure they have a minimum aptitude for technology and some level of skill in the areas that are important to us. We want a way, with some level of confidence, to say that a person who has xx certification knows yy skills.

    In the Microsoft world we can be sure that our platforms and technologies will change at least every 2-3 years, with major or minor revisions to all parts of the product we use. We might see minor tool changes, but fundamental feature enhancements or vice versa.  However even when there are major changes, the revisions to the effective way we accomplish tasks doesn’t change much. It evolves, and I think that a core set of skills can be measured, and more importantly, scored.

    How we do that, I’m not sure. As Brent Ozar said, however, the experiment must go on. We, as an industry and group, should be finding ways to assess our community, and drive forward our profession. I’d like to think that we could build an open source framework that allows for the presentation of a situation, and the evaluation of a result. It could be a framework like tsqlt, which allows us to write tests that can be evaluated by a scoring system. By taking a script of some sort, and comparing it to a “question”, some automated measurement would be able to determine if the question was answered (or partially answered).

    Our community could easily build a bank of hundreds, if not thousands, of questions. Want to evaluate someone? Download 50 questions, drop someone in a room for an hour and see how much they get done. They might not finish, which would be a good test in and of itself. Run their answers through a scoring engine and get a report back. With tags, we could easily separate questions into a variety of packs that employers could use to test certain areas. Testing core skills, without too much worry about version specific items would allow questions to live for years. Heck, with the age of some SQL Server instances out here, I bet some companies still need SQL Server 2000 based tests.

    Ultimately I don’t think Microsoft will properly build and maintain a framework to evaluate candidates. They have too much incentive to cheat. They can fool lots of employers with easy to pass, paper diplomas and turn a profit with lots of easy certifications that sound good, but don’t really test skills. The future of measurement in technology will be like it is in many other fields, with independent bodies that provide a minimal level of educational skill for most individuals. It will consist of granular tests that measure skills, in real situations, not question and answer trivia. Some people will slip through, some will cheat, but it will work well enough when it falls out of the hands of vendors.

    Until that time, all you can do is prove your own skills, in person, through your publications, or with lots of good, valuable answers given to others.

    Steve Jones

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    Today’s 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.

    Follow Steve Jones on Twitter to find links and database related items and announcements.
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