Tag: career

I was reading a piece recently about the problems many new college graduates will face as they enter the workforce. There are less and less jobs available in many industries and a large reason for this is the advances in technology that have eliminated many jobs. Technology has made people more efficient, allowing companies to hire less staff. Or at least management thinks less staff is needed. New applications and devices have allowed self service operations for many types of tasks that might have required an employee in the past. This is a trend that is likely to continue.

Do we just need less people working in the world? I don’t think so. For every job we eliminate, there are new opportunities that come about. Unfortunately the new openings often require different skills from the position eliminated, which means that often the person who lost the job can’t take advantage of the new opening without some re-tooling of their skills.

Those of us in technology find ourselves moving from place to place, learning new skills and technologies easily because that’s the nature of the business. However in many other fields, it’s not as easy for individuals to gain new skills. This Friday I wanted to ask those in technology if they think about the impact their work has on others.

Do you feel guilty about the jobs that technology eliminates?

I used to feel that it was up to everyone to ensure they could find a new job if they lost their current one. It seemed to be a capitalist market idea that change will occur, new industries will arise as old ones die, and everyone ought to be prepared to transition to a new career. However technology seems to hasten the process, and so many people do not seem to be able to make the change quickly to a new field or a new industry.

Or perhaps they are too slow to embrace the idea of change.

I feel that technology has made the world better overall, and the tremendous amount of data that we capture, analyze, and use to make decisions allows the world to function better. We have room for improvement, and we certainly have security and privacy concerns, but we do need to find solutions to those problems and prepare for change in the future. We also need to make sure the next generation also understands that they will need to be more flexible and better trained then in the past.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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

• Watch the Windows Media Podcast – 27.5MB WMV 
• Watch the iPod Video Podcast – MB MP4 
• Watch the MP3 Audio Podcast – 4.3MB MP3 

Dave Winer has been programming a long time. He’s not done, not ready to be done, and he has more creative work to be done in his career. After 37 years programming, it’s refreshing to see someone still excited about building software and looking forward to doing it for years to come.

Dave also sees himself as an a movie director, but one that people don’t believe it. He makes an analogy to other directors, who are older, who have had success and failure, but are still encouraged to make more movies. If we have developers and programmers that have had success and failure, why wouldn’t we encourage them to keep making more software? It’s a great question, and one that I with more people would think about. Managers should consider it, but we should consider it ourselves. Why do we think that older programmers aren’t as valuable as younger ones?

I like the analogies that Dave makes later in the post. He stops to admire his work, he thinks about it more, and he’s not in a rush anymore. Too often I think younger programmers, and immature managers, want to rush into producing actual work. They want to get code written and something executing on the screen rather than stopping to spend a little time architecting and planning.

I heard a great quote recently from Abraham Lincoln that I think applies. He said “If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six hours sharpening the ax.” We should stop and consider problems when we encounter them, and think about all the tools and techniques we’ve learned in the past, bringing our experience to bear before embarking on a solution. The wise developers I know tend to do this, knowing they have time to write the code and will make fewer mistakes if they think a little before they start typing.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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

• Watch the Windows Media Podcast – 20.4MB WMV 
• Watch the iPod Video Podcast – 16.9MB MP4 
• Watch the MP3 Audio Podcast – 3.5MB MP3 

Today we have an editorial from Aug 8, 2007 that is being republished as Steve is on holiday.

You wouldn’t think that it would take much to woo interns to Silicon Valley, especially for Google. My guess is that Google and Microsoft get to fight over the top candidates, and neither of them is really a loser. It’s all the other companies out there that end up getting the less highly rated interns.

Which is cool with me. It would have given me lots of other choices if I were graduating 🙂

Still, how cool would it be to get to the Bill Gate summer BBQ while in college?

I had the chance to intern at Virginia Power a long time ago and it turned out to be a great experience. I was an EE graduate student at the time and ended up in the maintenance group learning how to schedule maintenance and giving input for work that was actually being done. Done by someone else, of course. It was, after all, a nuclear power plant. You can’t have interns running around with wrenches tightening reactor bolts. It is rightie-tightie, right?

However I ended up moving over to the IT group and writing a scheduling application that my old department actually used to manage their work. I stayed in IT, switched to computer engineering, and the rest is history.

I think interning is a great idea and it gives you the chance to groom someone for your company. It’s a chance for students to learn, do real work, and you to find out who fits and doesn’t fit in your organization. And it brings a new perspective to your group, with the addition of someone that isn’t set in their ways. After the recent Revisit What You Know, maybe that’s a really good thing.

I think there are less IT people to choose from overall, especially as salaries stagnate a little and the layoffs continue, but there is still a demand for people that’s hard to fill. If your company doesn’t look to hire people right out of college, maybe they should.

Investing in yourself is key to growing in your career and enjoying the rest of your life. You should invest in your knowledge, and I’ve written about the need to constantly improve your skills over time. I know you need to think about your financial future as well and make sure you are looking forward to the day when you might not want to work full time in technology. I’ve also written that you need to make some personal investments in your health to be sure that you are around to enjoy a long life.

I saw this post about finding exercise in life’s margins. Taking the stairs, or walking while on the phone. Small things that allow you to fit in some movement around the rest of your life. That’s a great way to improve your health without making drastic changes in your life. Consider a standing desk, something I’m experimenting with, but look to find ways to take care of yourself while balancing the most limited resource you have: time.

The idea of finding ways to exercise in the margins of your life makes me think this might be a good way to improve your knowledge as well. Are there margins of time in your day when you can learn something? Perhaps you can take 5 less minutes at lunch a few times a week and browse through forums, looking to answer some question on your own and try to improve your T-SQL. Maybe you spend an hour on Sunday morning, browsing through Database Weekly and reading a few blog posts about topics that interest you. Maybe you take the last 10 minutes of the day and read a book on T-SQL. It might take you all year to get through the book, but that’s one more book you’d finish this year. If you have a commute, download the MCM videos from SQLskills and listen on the way.

Life is busy, and life is hard, and life is often something that happens when you’re making all kinds of other plans. It’s hard to fit in big projects or concentrated efforts to improve your career, but maybe you can find a little time in the margins and find a way to improve your skills without taking too much time away from the rest of your life.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

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

• Watch the Windows Media Podcast – 22.6MB WMV 
• Watch the iPod Video Podcast – 19.0MB MP4 
• Watch the MP3 Audio Podcast – 3.9MB MP3