Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • An Investment in Knowledge

    Benjamin Franklin was an amazing and insightful person

    “An Investment in Knowledge Pays the Best Interest.” – ~Benjamin Franklin

    Most of us are working to provide for ourselves and our families. We go to a job every day, earning money that we use to pay our bills and, hopefully, enjoy our lives outside of work. Most of us should be saving for retirement as well, for the future when we might not be able to work, or we’ve reached that age where we want to slow down. Given the recent issues in our economies around the globe, perhaps we ought to be saving even more, and not just for retirement. The chances that any of us will be out of work at some point are going up and we might need that savings for that kind of rainy day.

    The quote above is one that I saw years ago, and while I intuitively knew it was right, I’m not sure that it made the impact on me it should have. One of the reasons that it is important to save and invest now for your retirement is that your savings grow, compounding the interest over time to provide amazing growth. I might argue that the investments you make in your knowledge do the same thing.

    If you learn to write better T-SQL now, you will write much better code in the future, making everything you build run a little faster. Learn to eliminate simple  bugs, or avoid SQL Injection-able code, and your work will need less maintenance, or cause less issues. Over time you’re build the reputation, or brand, as someone that is worth hiring. You’ll be worth 50 average employees, and likely never on the market. If you do great work people will be looking to hire you, friends will recommend you, and your former bosses will call you whenever they need someone.

    We can’t all be superstars, or be amazing programmers, but we can all improve our skills and the more we invest in ourselves, the more it’s likely to pay off for us in the future. Just remember that it’s not just hard skills like T-SQL, clustering, etc that matter. Those soft skills of communication, networking, and getting along with others are just as important.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Pop Tarts and Hurricanes

    The second most dold item at Wal-Mart before a hurricane.

    What do people buy most of before a hurricane? Wal-Mart determined that batteries are the number ones sales item before a hurricane, but the second most sold item was surprising: pop-tarts. That’s the type of intelligence that can come from analysts asking the right questions about their customers and then IT delivering systems that can help them get an answer.

    More and more companies are starting to deal with big data. Big data is usually seen as extremely large sets of data. Those data sets  often exceed the capability of what a single database server can handle, and place a strain on existing IT infrastructures, especially when there is an explosion of new datab types. Hadoop is an open source framework that’s designed to deal with large sets of data and help with the processing and analysis of these large data sets.

    Microsoft recently added support for Hadoop to SQL Sever. Granted it’s only in the Parallel Data Warehouse, which is a highly specialized version of SQL Server integrated with specific hardware. However I am sure this will eventually make its way to other editions over time.

    Update: I made a mistake, there is a connector for non PDW SQL Server 2008 R2 instances.

    I don’t know if I would recommend learning Hadoop, but the techniques of processing large sets, and performning analysis on big data is important., Even more important might be the writing of well performing T-SQL code that will be used. I’d recommend you read about ways to write better code, and learn to integrate those skills into your daily work. You don’t always need them, but you often don’t know that when you are writing the code.

    It doesn’t take much more effort to write better code the first time, but it does take more effort to learn to do so. It’s an investment in your career that you ought to be regularly working on to become one of those talented people that is in demand in the future.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • The Talent Crunch

    IT Jobs are everywhere. Check out the listings on any of these sites.

    Is it a good time to be in the technology business? I think so, as the US unemployment rate stands at just above 9%, but the rate in IT is listed as about 4%. There might be some errors in how they are classifying and counting IT jobs, and the unemployment is not evenly distribute across the US, but that still seems like a significant difference. As a comparison, much of the medical profession is similarly employed, as are teachers (yeah!), but construction trades are showing  > 20% unemployment.

    Not only are there lots of jobs in the technology area, but overall technology pays a much higher salary (or wage) than many other industries. Whether you think you are paid well or not, peruse some other professions on Dice, Monster, or another job board and compare salaries. Keep in mind the US median income is $48k, meaning half the people make more and half make less. I suspect most IT workers are in the “more” side of that range.

    I think it’s also likely that the unemployment rate in technology could decline further. There’s an interesting report from Dice (2MB PDF) that indicates we are in a talent crunch as well that could become more problematic in the future. More than a few places predict that we will have a shortage of skilled technology workers in the future. Some of those predictions are based on enrollment in college math and science programs, which can be faulty. IT work doesn’t require a college degree, and perhaps shouldn’t.

    However it does seem that we have an ever increasing need for people to work in technology. I’ve had friend worry that our own efforts to improve and automate things would result in fewer jobs, but it seems that’s not the case. The gains in individual productivity in both the development and administrative areas are easily outstripped by the huge growth in the numbers of applications and servers to manage.

    Hopefully you have a good career in IT, and will have one for as long as you want one. I’d caution you to think carefully about the title of this piece. There’s a crunch for talented people, not just people. You need to work on your technical skills, and your soft skills, regularly if you want to be in demand in the future.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Benefits

    Still a 1/2 gallon

    One of the ways in which some companies have tried to keep the prices of their products down is by changing the packaging. It used to be that you would buy a half gallon of ice cream or laundry detergent, but now you’ll find that often you are getting slightly less for the same price you used to pay. For the former that might be a nice way of lowering your portions but for the latter that’s just annoying. I find that to be a subtle point of deception by some companies, and it likely will continue into future.

    For those of us that work for a company, we might find a similar erosion in an area that we have come to expect a certain level of benefit. A recent survey from the Society for Human Resource Management found that many companies were lowering the level of benefits that they offer to workers. The costs of those benefits have been rising, and as companies try to keep a certain level of profitability, it seems workers are feeling some of the effects.

    I think most of us expect that our health benefits will cost more in the future, at least under the current state of healthcare in the US. Many of us are also sure that the days of regular bonuses are gone for now, but there are some other subtle benefits that you might not realize are disappearing. Tuition reimbursement is going away at many companies, perhaps with the idea that the education isn’t as valuable to companies as in the past. Charitable donations have declined, and it seems less companies are allowing casual dress or flexible work time. That might not impact the technology groups yet, but it’s a trend that concerns me, and perhaps should concern you. Benefits might become more of an issue in the future, especially as you change jobs.

    It’s not all bad. There are more companies offering gyms to workers, which I think is great, and more companies offer cell phones to employees. That last trend, however, seems to be leading more of a liability than a benefit.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts