Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Time Off

    snowboarding
    I am looking forward to some time off this winter on the slopes.

    As a US citizen, I’m lucky to work for a UK company. I get a generous allotment of vacation, and desperately try to use it all each year. I haven’t been successful yet, but I’m getting closer. If we could only get a little more snow at the beginning and end of the season…..

    Last year a friend told me that they lost 6 days of vacation. Over a few years this person had accumulated extra vacation by basically working too hard and when the year ended, some of their vacation was lost because of carryover limits. This person vowed to change this year and use all their vacation, but with a busy job at a small company I’m not sure that will come true. Unfortunately, I’ve all too often seen this same behavior from many people in IT.

    This piece shows that all too often people are not taking their vacation, or they’re not taking it as a complete break from work. I’ve been in both situations, and over time I’ve learned that I’m not being more productive in either case. I’m unbalanced, and over time I become less productive. That’s especially true if I’m doing creative work, like writing, or developing code.

    There’s no shortage of poor managers out there, and there are plenty of them that will work you as hard as you allow. I don’t have any great solutions for dealing with them other than scheduling vacation every year, insisting you get to take it, limiting contact with work, and if all else fails, looking for another job.

    Life is short, too short to spend more of it as work than you have to. Take advantage of your vacation to relax and recharge, even if it’s a stay-cation at home. Getting away from work is not only important, it’s something you owe to yourself and your family.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.

  • Learning C

    Head First C
    I think C is important to teach the basics of programming.

    Someone else gets it. Besides me, I mean. We should be teaching people the C programming language. An interview with David Griffiths, author of Head First C, says that learning C is a good idea. I concur, and I stand by my statement.

    It’s not that I think everyone should be a C expert, but I’d like to see more programmers spend 5 months, a semester, early in their programming careers. If you’ve written your own iOS app, this would be a piece of cake. If you’re a Python guru, it would broaden your horizons. Getting closer to hardware helps you write code in a more thoughtful way.

    I’d like to see a C programming course as a semester requirement for quite a few fields that might need to develop programs. Not only computer science majors, but also scientists that might need to deal with building their own algorithms. In the same vein, perhaps it’s worth a SQL class for everyone to better understand how to work with sets of data. A query class could also include some of the other query languages, perhaps MDX and XQuery would make sense as well.

    I know this sounds like busy work, but as we become more and more dependent on data and scripting for all sorts of jobs I think it makes sense to start setting a baseline of expected skill for knowledge workers. Those people that knew programming could potentially pass a C test,  and they would be exempt. As we evolve into the future, especially as we may move to more vocational type training, I think it would be good to still require some basics of people as they begin their journey to working with code and computers.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.

  • Milk

    cow
    It’s amazing how much knowledge goes into selecting cows for milk production.

    I love this quote: “[we] ran it through a fairly sophisticated computing gobbledygook. It spit out at the other end predicted transmitting ability, predicted genetic values of whatever sort.”  How would you like to explain your complex analysis to a business user using those terms? In most cases, those might be the best way to describe things to most users.

    However that quote comes from a scientist that has spent a lot of time and knowledge refining models and using lots of data to try and predict the bulls whose progeny will result in the best dairy cow performance. The article is very interesting and talks a bit about the complexity of using genome data on cattle and how far it is from the experiments Mendel performed on pea plants. I still remember the dominant/recessive gene explanations from biology, though that explanation seems simplistic now. Comparing it to the work done by scientists predicting cow performance is like comparing horse drawn carriages to Formula 1 race cars.

    Big data is in the news, with so many companies building products they want to sell to help you tame, analyze, and use the data your organization has available. However as this article hints, it’s much more than managing all that data. There is a tremendous amount of knowledge and intelligence needed to use those tools and actually generate useful information.

    As data professionals, we don’t necessarily need all that knowledge, but we do need to communicate with those individuals that may have the knowledge and work closely with them to ensure their ideas are accurately applied against data in the algorithms we write. In addition to writing code and understanding statistics, strong communication skills are important to moving your career forward.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.

  • Better Bosses Needed

    Bad Boss Contest
    Hopefully your boss wouldn’t end up in this contest.

    Raise your hand if you have a bad boss. Now raise your hand if you’ve ever had a bad boss. I can’t quite make a count, but I’m hoping that those of you with raised hands constitute a minority of my readers. I’m somewhat afraid that you probably constitute a majority.

    That’s not such a bad thing, right? After all, many of us have had lots of bosses, starting at age 16 or 17, and continuing on through today. There’s a good chance that somewhere along the line we had a really, really bad boss. The people that used to manage paper boys, or clerks, or fast food cooks aren’t known for their superior leadership skills, are they?

    However you would think that in business that developing good managers would be a priority, wouldn’t you? So many people seem to lavish much of the success in business on management, so one would think that companies actually do spend time and money to train managers to be excellent at their jobs. Please stop laughing, you’re distracting me from continuing.

    Those of you that have been managers know that all too often there is no training. People are thrown into the job, expected to manage while learning on the job. Those that survive, or perhaps thrive, get promoted. Unfortunately that’s the theory. All too often I find those that please their boss are promoted.

    A bad boss can be rather damaging, and in these days of complex systems, short deadlines, and a struggle to to find good employees, wouldn’t you want to keep as many good employees as you can? If you can’t train great managers, can you at least train them to not be bad ones?

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.