Tag: career

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.

Part of working in Information Technology is working during off hours. In one company we had a standing maintenance window every Friday night. It was annoying for the family, but it did build a nice bond among the production staff during our many Friday night dinners together. Another company allowed maintenance only from midnight Saturday to 6am Sunday, once a quarter. Those restrictions, while annoying, certainly taught us to prepare and test everything in advance.

The systems we build and support are often in use during the business day by our companies and clients. That usually means that patches or changes to the applications take place in off hours, and that means the IT staff is used to working at night and on weekends to make changes. This Friday I’m wondering what that means for the SQL Server community.

What type of maintenance windows do you typically operate under?

Do you have regular maintenance scheduled? When you patch systems or make changes, how does that impact your schedule during the week? Do you get any comp time or flexible scheduling to accommodate patches?

It’s interesting right now with SQLServeCentral. Since most of the staff at Red Gate operates on GMT and most of the audience is in one of the US timezones, it’s preferable for changes to the systems to be made early in the morning in Cambridge. An 9-10am change window occurs at 4am EST/1am PST, and a relatively small amount of our audience is affected. These changes also mean that there are plenty of people in the office to respond if there are issues.

In most companies I’ve worked in, we had limited change windows, and restrictions at different times of the year, but overall we had regular maintenance scheduled and available to allow us to maintain our systems and allow staff to plan for work during off-hours, with some type of flexible time for employees stuck working after hours. Let us know today if that’s the case at your job.

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 – 24.9MB WMV 
• Watch the iPod Video Podcast – 19.1MB MP4 
• Watch the MP3 Audio Podcast – 3.9MB MP3