Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Stack Ranking

    stack monster
    Would you want to work in a place that might rank you relatively, rather than absolutely?

    Vanity Fair ran a piece awhile back about Microsoft and their tenure under Steve Ballmer. It’s no secret that Microsoft lost some of their dominance over the last decade and their fiscal performance has been less than outstanding. While they have built some great products in that time (XBOX, SQL Server, Windows 7), they’ve faltered and stalled on others, and have made their share of mistakes. Today I think many people see Microsoft as an important part of the tech world, but not necessarily a company that dominates any part of their industry.

    One of the interesting things in the piece was a note that there is a stack ranking system of reviewing people. It’s a brutal system that pits people against each other, with the idea that there is a distribution of performance. Each group will have a high performer, and a low performer (or more than one) and a number of people in the middle. No matter what the actual circumstances, that’s how people are graded.

    When I worked at Peoplesoft as a manager, we had a similar system. We graded people from 1-5, 5 being the highest. We had to have proof someone was worth a 1 or a 5, but we also couldn’t rank everyone as a 2, 3, or 4. We had to distribute our people. After I ranked my group and turned it in, our director had a “budget” of people ranked as 4s, and we had to argue with other managers to see which of our 4s would be downgraded to a 3.

    I thought that was crazy. Some people thrive in that environment, but some don’t. Many people want to go to work and do work that would be rated a 3 or 4. Companies need those people because there’s always a percentage of work that suits people that do 4, 3, or even 2 level work. This Friday, ignoring the merits of such a system, I wanted to ask how you feel.

    Would you like to work in a company that uses a stack ranking system?

    I know I wouldn’t. I’m competitive, but that type of system just isn’t for me. I prefer to get along with and work with others, not compete with them on a daily basis.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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

  • T-SQL Tuesday #32 – A Life in the Day

    tsqltuesdayIt’s T-SQL Tuesday time again, delayed a week this month, so I had  a whole extra week to get ready. This month the party is hosted by Erin Stallato, fellow MVP, runner, and a SQL Server expert. Such an expert, she was recently hired by SQL Skills, one of the top SQL Server consulting firms in the world.

    The T-SQL Tuesday party is the brainchild of Adam Machanic and it’s been a lot of fun to participate over the last few years. If you’re like to host one, you just need a blog, and then contact Adam for a month with your topic.

    A Life in the Day

    This month’s topic is a life in the day of your job. Erin’s plan was to track your life on Wednesday, July 11 or Thursday, July 12. That won’t work for me, as you can see from my tracking on Wed and Thur.

    Wed, July 11

    Wake up, check email, kiss the wife and kids and drive to the Denver Airport. Board a flight for London.

    Thur, July 12

    Arrive in London, clear customs, get a tube to Central London. Leave my bags at the hotel, find some food, read, run in Hyde Park, nap, practice SQL in the City presentations, dinner with Red Gate people, sleep.

    Travel

    This is a travel/talk week for me, so I don’t have a lot going on those days. So for this post, I’m going to track Monday, July 9, 2012 as it’s a semi-normal day for me.

    Mon, July 9

    It’s summer, and I work at home, so that means that I can sleep in a bit. A party with friends last night, so I wasn’t up until 8:30. I usually wake up, and reach over to grab my phone. I can check email and lay there for a few minutes, slowly getting going. Today there weren’t any big items to handle. No meetings, a few updates for my SQL in the City talk, and regular mix of reported posts, new content submitted, newsletters, etc. I also usually check Twitter to see if any news is breaking in the SQL world.

    Make coffee. Usually the first thing I do, heading downstairs before I walk into the office. Then I walk up to my standing desk and log in, checking the site.

    Most mornings I have a bit of a routine. I double check email to see anything new since I’ve walked downstairs and then start to handle any of the items I read in bed. Usually that means removing SPAM posts, answering questions from Red Gate or members of the community. I get a fair number of normal business queries each day, and try to get them answered. Today I had a note about travel in London with my reservations and questions about my dinner order Thur (we are well taken care of at Red Gate). I had a few notes about my talks I responded to and a few posts to remove.

    Go get coffee.

    Next I flip through all my post notifications. I have my daily editorial thread, but I also answer or participate in about 80-100 threads a month on SQLServerCentral. I answer some as I sip coffee, usually spending 30-60 minutes on discussions.

    Moar coffee (as Jes Borland would tweet)

    I flip through a few newsletters, just to see what others are doing/writing about. I get a lot of editorial ideas from here (and Twitter, and Google, etc), so I subscribe to 20-30 different newsletters. The SQLskills and Brent Ozar, PLF newsletters come out Monday, and I usually read through them. They are always interesting to me.

    Water.

    I’m doing the Body for Life diet with my wife. We’ve done it a few times, so lots of water throughout the day. I also eat every 2-3 hours, smaller meals. These have some good matches with the standing desk. I need to regularly hit the bathroom, or break for 10-15 minutes to cook something. Those breaks are good for the standing desk. If I ever run out of water, I walk away to fill it.

    This Friday and Saturday I have to give two presentations each day for SQL in the City. I’m traveling Wed/Thur, so my first step is to get newsletter scheduled for the week. I am usually 2-3 days ahead on podcasts and 4-5 days on editorials. Last week I scheduled a few re-runs for Thur/Fri, so today I edit down a podcast for Tuesday and upload it. Wed is a guest, so I schedule out newsletters through Friday.

    Now it’s practice time. These are new presentations, so first I run through the demos I have. I want the demos working and then backed out and ready. I go through each one with a setup and a reset script for the demo. Most of these are with Red Gate tools, so they’re easy.

    Once demos are ready, I’ll go through the presentation here, incorporating the demos and checking timing. The SQL in the City events are packed and scheduled fairly tight, so I don’t want to go over my time. Today I’ll do two rehearsals of each presentation to be ready.

    Throughout the day I have Twitter up (using Twhirl). I’ll glance at the stream periodically, but I rarely scroll back or look at things. It’s a nice break, and it lets me see what’s happening in the SQL world. Between run throughs of the demos and decks, I’ll glance around.

    I keep email open, but I don’t check all that often, maybe once every couple hours. With Pandora on headphones, I can concentrate on looking over my demos and notes. Not a good day. My VMs ran slow, and I blew up each demo twice, which was slightly worrisome. However I made a few notes on how to smooth things out for the actual delivery, and I’ll go over them live, on the laptop, tomorrow. The contained databases demos were especially problematic as I found a few problems with my reset scripts. I’ll clean those tomorrow as well.

    After two runs, that’s enough. I glanced at the forums on SQLServerCentral to see if anything much had popped up, then spent an hour working on a few editorials. I polished off 2 that were mostly written. I’ll give those a review tomorrow. I started two new ones, getting about 2-3 paragraphs written. Those are mostly done, but I ran out of thoughts. I copied in 2 other links, with just draft titles. I’ll try to work on those while I’m traveling.

    6:00 and I’m calling it a day. Time to run.

  • A Cool Job

    Unisys ES7000
    How would you like to play with this server every day?

    I saw recently that the newly approved TPC-E Benchmark, a test of OLTP systems, is having a test system submitted by Unisys. They’ll be the first ones to send a system, in this case the ES7000, through it’s paces with this benchmark.

    It’s got to be a cool process and I’ve got feelers out to Unisys to try and dig further into what goes on when you try to build a system to test the benchmark. I have the feeling this will be an interesting story, so be on the lookout for that.

    However I’ll speculate a little that this has to be a very interesting exercise. The application is static, after all, it’s a standard set of routines (I’m assuming) that you’ll run against your server. So the challenge is in sizing and tuning your system. Tweak a knob, hit the turbo switch, get advice from the MS guys, it’s got to be an interesting day’s work.

    And I’m sure it’s incredibly enlightening. What does file placement mean? How far can you push a system? At the very least you’d think that they’d build some sort of real-time, F1-like dashboard so they can watch the system go.

    Heck, that would be a cool job just to build some application to receive the telemetry of the system in real time and display it on some sort of dashboard. Maybe I’ll see if Unisys wants someone to work on that aspect of the test system.

    Now if we could just have some real-time knobs and sliders on the server to actually adjust various parameters…

  • The DBA Tax

    Are you an asset or a tax?

    When I started working with a small company in Denver over a decade ago, SQL Server 7 had just been released. One of the marketing messages for the product was that it was self-tuning and didn’t need a DBA. More than a few of my friends asked if I was worried about my job. If we upgraded from SQL Server 6.5, would I lose my job? Was I worried? I wasn’t and we’ve seen in the decade since that there’s no shortage of a need for DBAs to manage database systems.

    That hasn’t stopped many companies from trying to build products and solutions that don’t have a DBA tax. They want a tool that doesn’t need a DBA, or a developer to tune queries. Some get closer than others, but most still require someone with technical skills to work on the platform, and help ensure it runs smoothly.

    When PowerPivot was released a few years ago, I heard no shortage of fears from data professionals that this tool would eliminate much of their work. Since then I’ve heard no shortage of consultants and BI developers say that this tool has spurred even more work for them. It simplifies prototyping, and allows for a better front end experience, but it also requires better data, cleaner data, and better models of data for users to work with. They are drowning in work.

    It’s easy to let fear drive you. It’s easy to let your concerns over technology replacing you limit your willingness to experiment and improve the systems you work on. However if you improve yourself, and your skills, I don’t think you’ll ever be seen as a “tax” on your company’s computer systems, but rather an asset that is worth paying the ongoing cost to keep.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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