It was very cool to come back to Syracuse for the first SQL Saturday. It was neat for me, since I used to live here, Shaw Residence Hall at Syracuse University:
In any case, the slides for my talk are here: Branding Yourself for a Dream Job.pptx
If you have questions, please reach out to me or leave a comment below.
Most of us will have more than one job in our career. In fact many of us will likely find a new job in the next five years. I hope I’m not in that group, but I recognize that it’s a possibility. We never know when our situation will change, or our employer’s situation will change. That is one reason I recommend you keep your resume up to date and continue to work on improving your skills.
I saw an office hours short recently from Brent Ozar, in which someone had asked him if they should apply for a job even though they didn’t meet all of the requirements or know all of the desired technologies. Brent recommended the person apply, and his reasoning was that often a DBA (or other data pro) often gets asked to do a variety of tasks in an organization. The DBA job often crosses lots of boundaries and may end up working on a Active Directory issues, reporting, ETL, and more. When A DBA leaves a job, the organization looks for a replacement that can handle that same wide variety of things.
I think this is good advice, and I usually tell people that if you meet 50% of the requirements, apply. Part of this is Brent’s reasoning, part of it is because I’ve had to write job descriptions, part of it is because I’ve interviewed people. While we often have a standard description, usually I then think about how our technology matrix has changed over time and add items to the job description. If I ask another employee what else we might need in a candidate, more requirements get added. At some point, the job description isn’t realistic anymore and it’s unlikely we’d ever find a person that meets 100% of our desires.
The other thing I’ve learned in interviews is that sometimes a candidate impresses us and makes the interviewer think about the position differently. Maybe the candidate is impressive enough in some areas that we can ignore their deficiencies in others. Sometimes the candidate might say something that causes me (as the interviewer) to pivot the job slightly to address other possibilities I think of at that moment.
Job hiring isn’t a meritocracy. It’s a mix of many things, often depending on what the interviewer thinks at that time, how the candidate impresses them, and maybe some restrictions on who they can hire. I’ve seen companies that won’t hire developers without a CS degree, regardless of experience. I’ve seen situations where the hiring manager creates a new position because the candidate is so desirable. I’ve sometimes chosen a weaker technical candidate over a near expert in an area because of soft skills.
There are lots of variables, and you can’t control them, but you can control a few things. You can work on the way you communicate with others and improve your skills, both verbal and written. You can also showcase your ability to learn and adapt, whether that’s with stories and examples or a blog that you can point to, documenting the work you’ve done on your skills.
This is a tough time for many tech professionals, but it’s also a time where there are many open positions in lots of companies. Part of this is an mismatch of candidates and opportunities not finding each other. Part is a more discriminating approach from companies who don’t just want people, but talented people, talented in multiple ways including soft skills.
You never know when you’ll need a new job, so make sure you’re prepared to impress others. Make sure you spend time on your career on a regular basis.
Steve Jones
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As I’ve been working with some AI (Artificial Intelligence) technologies, what I’ve often found is that they produce junior-level code. The code I’d expect from someone early in their career or inexperienced in a particular area. That is code that likely works, but isn’t efficient or clean or perhaps incomplete in some way.
I’m sure AI technologies will improve, and we’ll be able to train them better for our environment. Just like we train junior developers to be better. However, what does that mean for junior people across the next decade? I ran across an interesting post on the death of the junior developer, which speculates we might have a problem as an industry.
The post references an article from Gene Kim, where a law firm sees a similar problem with their junior people, who are associates. That position might be equivalent to the junior developer in software. Someone with more experience and knowledge often reviews work and helps shape it, even though the junior person does the work. With AI, however, we might not need the junior person. Instead, the AI produces work the senior person has to review. Finding issues with associate work is a lot like finding hallucination problems in AI responses.
The same could be said of coding. There is plenty of poorly written code, but if senior people become good at writing prompts and getting the same code back that a junior developer would write, then how many junior people do we need? Arguably less, though you might still need a few. Or you might think that you need all the junior people and you’ll get 10x more work done, clearing your backlog. Certainly, I know most developers, DBAs, and other IT people have a large backlog of problems.
However, the problem with junior people using LLM (large language model) AIs and getting more done is that they might generate a lot more bad code, so much that your senior people can’t find the time to review the code and you end up with systems that contain even more technical debt than you have today. Perhaps we even find systems that don’t perform well enough for regular use or create constant issues that your developers try to fix with AI, which might not work. I can certainly see things deteriorating rapidly.
There’s a great quote in the Gene Kim piece: “I believe this furthers the case that AI helps the experienced people far more than inexperienced people — the seniors more than the juniors.”
I’m starting to think that might be the case. Senior people are going to become very productive, and very valuable. Junior people are going to struggle, and while they’ll get work done, the quality will vary. Maybe that’s good, or maybe we will start to see a rapid divergence of not only productivity but salaries. If you can hire a senior person to produce better code at the same rate as your 5 junior people, maybe you’ll want to pay that senior person $200k a year and reduce junior rates to $45k a year.
I don’t know that we’ll see rapid changes, as many organizations are slow to alter the way they hire, code, or structure their staff. However, as there is success by others, especially when it’s touted in places like the ETLS, I can see other managers being influenced. That will filter over time to those who hire to pick the productive, senior-level people who can showcase some code skills in an interview. Craft a prompt to solve a problem, get some code back, refine it, explain where and why you’d change your prompt or use parts of the code, and we might see the AI-capable people getting hired quickly, and for fantastic compensation.
I don’t know that I think this reduces a lot of junior staff, mostly because of organizational inertia, but I do think that learning to be better at your craft and learning to use AI is likely to increase your future earnings.
Steve Jones
I know a lot of people in this business do not have computer science degrees. While some do, I suspect it’s a minority. I’m certainly curious, so if you want to share your education experience in a comment, tell me if you have a degree and what the focus was, as well as answer a few other questions.
At DevOps Days in Minneapolis recently, professors Fox and Sen from Macalester College talked about their computer science curriculum for growing the next generation of professionals. Along the way, they also asked the audience these questions:
While these are good questions for any curriculum, these are interesting points to reflect on for any sort of learning. If you learned about technology in the military, on the job, or by yourself, what did others (or you) think was important and required? What did you feel was left out of your learning?
Of my small group of 4 that chatted about this, only one of us had a CS degree. I started in CS, but I actually have an economics degree. I switched to business, sensing more opportunity in the 80s there. However, I’ve continued to learn, even taking some classes post-graduation, that helped me learn more about computing.
It was an interesting look at a modern CS major, with lots of comments from the audience. The professors left us with their questions about how to look to the future, address AI, and even if they should teach an operating systems course, something both feel is missing from Computer Science at their college.
I think computer science is important for the world to advance how we build systems, but a lot of the deep theory on topics isn’t something that many of us need to learn. I would like to see a software engineering major come about that emphasizes more of the knowledge we’ve learned about building software, with emphasis on version control techniques, software design architectures, and process flows. While DevOps has been amazing, a lot of that knowledge could be used to better teach people how to build software in different ways. Distributed systems, database theory, performance measurement, and even different ways of managing code are things that need deep treatment, not just a module in another course.
Let me know today what you think of your education in computers.
Steve Jones
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