Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Keeping Your Soul

    Is your soul for sale?

    Last year I got into a debate, and an argument, with a friend over the growth of Google and their profits. I took the position that while Google has provided a good service to the world with their search engine and their founders have earned money, they will find it harder and harder to continue to follow the mantra of “do no evil” if they feel they need to continue to grow their profits. Given the recent shutdowns of some of the “good projects” they had embarked upon to make the world a better place, that prediction seems to be coming true.

     

    Building a business is hard, and as shown in the numbers, most don’t succeed. Many do, however, and the vast majority of businesses out in the world today are small ones, with less than a 100 people. However those small businesses don’t account for most of the revenue in the US.  Large businesses do, which isn’t all the unexpected since those large companies do business in areas that are important to most people (energy, oil, banking, etc.).

     

    In the technology world, it seems that we often hear about “the next big thing” disrupting the way the world works and making people rich. The people in these companies are just like you and me; they built a product , caught the eyes of millions, and became a success. That dream has driven so many technology workers to come up with their own idea or go to work on someone else’s idea in a startup.

     

    However the chances of hitting it big are like the chances of hitting the lottery. Those chances are small, though I wouldn’t discourage anyone from pursuing that dream. What I do think, however, is that it’s not worth losing your soul over the chance to make money. I truly believe you can succeed, and make money, while making ethical and moral decisions that respect your customers. You might sacrifice some profit to do so, but in the end, I think that’s a good trade. I would certainly rather make a million dollars ethically than a billion dollars compromising my values.

     

    Steve Jones

     

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Tricky Questions

    What tricky questions have you been asked?

    I suspect that most of us have been on many interviews in our career. Unfortunately today’s technology business doesn’t seem driven towards having decades of employment for individuals at one job, so most of us will have more interviews sometime in the next five to ten years.

    I’ve had many interviews in my career, of all types with many different formats. I’ve had technical interviews with multiple people, tests to take, and interviews by managers that didn’t include a single T-SQL question. I’ve had a lot of success, and much of what has worked for me is a part of my presentation on branding, which you can see at the PASS Summit in 2011.

    With that in mind, I thought this Friday poll might be a good place to help you get prepared for your next interview by asking about the questions that others have been asked. The question this week is:

    What’s an interview question that has thrown you for a loop?

    It’s rare that I’ve actually been surprised by interview questions. I typically prepare for interviews, using a process that has worked for me since I was in college. I research the company, trying to understand what the business is, and if possible, the person that might interview me. I look for blogs or other information written by employees, and any information I can get to prepare for questions about the business or technology used in the company.

    There have been a few times I’ve been thrown by a specific technology question, usually asking for some switch, definition, or other detail that is easily gleaned from some documentation. For those questions, I practice making sure I know where to get the information and use to show that I understand what needs to be done and where to get the answer.

    Let us know today if you have any great questions you get asked, especially if you’ve been asked any of them more than once.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • The Career Path

    Which career path would you like?

    Most people seem to wander through their careers, taking any job that comes their way. Others have a tight focus, often with a larger goal of ending up as the owner of a company or perhaps the CIO of one.

    However for the technical person, someone that wants to remain employed for a long time, but doesn’t want to oversee others, there isn’t a clear path. So many DBAs, developers, and other people have no interest in moving into management, but they still would like to progress in some fashion to other jobs.

    This Friday I wanted to ask what that progression might be like if you had no restrictions from HR and could design your own set of jobs:

    What would you like your technical career path to look like?

    I am wondering if you think there ought to be some way to advance to a senior person, maybe with multiple levels after your title. Perhaps some of you would like to move into an architect position or even be seen as some technical fellow after some amount of time.

    Think about the way that a technical career might advance, without going into management, and let us know in which direction you wish you could move.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

  • Jobs for Data Scientists

    This is the trend line we like to see for database jobs

    I wrote about data scientists while back, which seems to be a field that involves the analysis of large amounts of data and the tools involved in this work. The definition of this area is a little nebulous, but that hasn’t stopped companies from looking for people to work in this area. There are jobs for data scientists, and perhaps for interesting, there seems to be more and more jobs for people to work with “big data”.

    This article shows a huge trend up in the “big data” keywords in job listings. That makes sense as I think the data growth has far outpaced the ability of tools to work with large datasets. Excel had a problem with large amounts of data until recently, and most of the other tools used are either very expensive or home grown.

    Many of the people subscribing to this newsletter are technical people, those that work to form the computer into a tool that someone else can use to do their job. It’s an interesting job, and one I hope you enjoy, but there are some of you out there that would like to do more with data than just find ways to help others query that data. Perhaps a data scientist is a job that you would like to move into at some point.

    This is an area that I suspect many companies will want to focus more efforts on in the future, and I think that being a DBA who knows how to query data and find patterns gives you a head start on moving into a position that can be challenging, fun, and perhaps most importantly, without much after hours work.

    If you like statistics, patterns, and helping your company actually make use of the information in data, perhaps a data scientist might be the position for you.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts