Tag: career

When I first saw this story, I was a bit disturbed. In an interview, for a statistician, the candidate was asked for his Facebook username and password. The interviewer wanted to view non-public parts of the candidate’s profile on Facebook, and the candidate refused and withdrew his job application. I’ve heard of this in the past, with the city of Bozeman asking for credentials, but it appears the practice is growing. College athletes are asked to “friend” coaching staff, and some public sector workers must connect with their superiors.

If I were asked in an interview, I would politely decline and state that I have set up privacy for a reason. There are things I post to share with friends and family that are not meant to be available for the general public. In my mind, these are akin to photo albums or letters I’ve written that I store in my house. Anything that I post publicly I take responsibility for, but private posts are private. I would suggest you do the same.

On one hand companies are free to ask and candidates are free to decline, and that’s the free market. At some point, however, if all companies were to ask for this, employees would essentially have no choice but to comply, which feels like an intrusion into employee’s lives at a higher level than I feel should be allowed. It strikes me as a little too 1984-ish for my own comfort.

Part of the problem is that the laws we’ve written for the real world frame the way we interact. Those laws, however, don’t necessarily translate and apply to the digital world, which means that we struggle to apply them in this new frame of reference. I think that we also aren’t always sure exactly how we would want to have our privacy or rights preserved in the digital world, and all too often we have companies, and criminals, taking advantage of that fact.

I suggest everyone make an effort to separate your public and professional posts and profile online. Point employers to a professional profile, and let them know this what they should expect from you at work. Your personal thoughts and ideas are separate, and you’ll keep them that way at work, just as you do in the digital world.

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 – 23.7MB WMV 
• Watch the iPod Video Podcast – 21.1MB MP4 
• Watch the MP3 Audio Podcast – 4.2MB MP3 

Today’s editorial was originally pubished on June 26, 2007. It is being re-run today as Steve is traveling. 

Of the best of the best, sir! (remember that one?)

Where’s the best place to work? Here’s the list from Computerworldfor 2007. I’m not surprised that a few of these companies (University of Miami, Quicken Loans) were in last year’s list. After all, if you’re a great company, you should be able to maintain that in the short term.

What’s more interesting, is that in the various lists (Best overall, Diversity, Benefits, etc.) is that a number of companies show up multiple times. For example, the University of Miami shows up in 4 of the 5 top tens. With the weather, maybe that’s the place to be.

I’m not sure I’d use this list as a way to seek out a job, but I’d certainly check it if I were applying somewhere because it shows that there are people that like the company. That’s important since I’m of the opinion that the people you work with and their attitudes are extremely important to having a good term of employment.

But most important is that you need to find the best fit for you. I interviewed with Pulte Homes (#69) a few years ago (2002?) and wasn’t impressed with the people. In fact, I wouldn’t have wanted to work there. Maybe things have changed since then, but I know I’d be wary of going back there as the culture didn’t seem to fit me.

I used to come into work, get some coffee, sit in a cube, put headphones on, and then spend my day stuck in the world of SQL Server. Solving problems, working on trouble tickets, analyzing performance and more. An occasional meeting interrupted me, and an empty coffee cup interrupted me more, but for the most part I worked as a DBA with headphones on, doing my job. However I wasn’t perfect. There were times that I surfed the web, looking for news, answering questions on forums or more.  Add this to the conversations with co-workers about non-work topics and it’s clear that 8 hours at work isn’t 8 hours of work.

I’m not alone, and most of my co-workers engaged in other sorts of distractions as well. We weren’t alone either, and this survey from Salary.com shows some interesting results. Many people spend time on the Internet on non-work tasks, and I think that’s OK. I also think it’s not much different from the pre-Internet days of work. Smoke breaks, random walks around the building, water cooler time, I think some people would be surprised how much time they spend away from “work” if their movements and efforts were tracked by the minute.

As humans, we aren’t going to focus on a single task for a long period of time unless it doesn’t require much thought. For anyone that has to think, however, distractions are necessary over time. Extreme concentration in one area can easily leave us locked in to a particular solution, creating tunnel vision. It’s also hard, and requires some downtime to recharge. That downtime at work can easily come from a few distractions that let your mind wander.  The best people I’ve worked with often had short breaks spread in their day. A game of table tennis, playing a song on a guitar, a short conversation, or even working with a co-worker on some problem unrelated to their job. What looked like a waste of time didn’t seem to affect their productivity.

Not everyone handles the freedom well, and plenty of people get distracted to the point of being unproductive. However eliminating all distractions doesn’t necessarily make them more productive. They’ll just find some other way to distract themselves. Great employers look to help people learn to manage themselves better, shortening breaks, learning to tackle problems as a challenge, and perhaps learning to become better at their craft by using some break time to learn more.

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 – 28.5MB WMV 
• Watch the iPod Video Podcast – 23.2MB MP4 
• Watch the MP3 Audio Podcast – 4.7MB MP3 

Today’s editorial was originally published on Apr 27, 2007. It is being re-run as Steve is at SQL Server Connections.

There are less people entering Computer Science in colleges and less people interested in traditional computer science practices. There’s concern among adademians and one questions: “Is Computer Science Dead?”

I heard something similar from my brother-in-law about 8 years ago. At the time he was a mail admin for a large company in Texas, running multiple mail servers handling somewhere in the 50,000 account range. At the time, that stressed a lot of the mail servers out there and it was a challenging job. But he worried about advances in automation and better software and thought that sysadmins would be mostly outdated in the next 5 years.

It’s 8 years later and I see DBAs and even SMS guys finding work in companies with less than 100 employees. So much for automation.

I took computer classes in high school in the early 80s and spent 2 years in a Comp Sci degree and two additional years in computer engineering and while I haven’t done a lot of programming, I’ve written enough software and been involved with developers to know that most of the fundamentals I learned with BASIC and Pascal still apply. Some of the C techniques involved with optimizing code and being very structured in your development still apply today in .NET, Ruby on Rails, or LISP. Even LISP, which I’ve never used outside of a academic world, still taught me how to program better.

Because it taught me to think about computing. And algorithms, and how things are processed.

I think CompSci is still a good major, as good as any other. I also think that we should require C programming to incoming students, force them to work with memory, understand pointers, solve the Tower of Hanoi, and other things without all the benefits you get from frameworks like .NET and J2EE. I don’t believe that much has changed in computer programming in 30 years. We have Procedural and OOP programming and the concepts in either can be applied to any environment. Maybe you could learn relational logic and SQL on top of that, but everything else is new ways of combining these old techniques.

All the rest is just syntax.