Andy Warren (LinkedIn | Blog | @sqlandy) and I had an idea for a way to give back to the community and help people. It’s the Mentoring Experiment, and we are taking applications from people through April 20.
If you’re interested in finding a mentor, and want to take a chance on getting picked, check out the site and submit your application.
When I was a kid I read a lot of science fiction books, all predicting that we would be driving in flying cars or have regular trips into space. There was this anticipation that we’d have robots helping us with many of the chores of our everyday life and that computers would be much more intelligent that they are now. That hasn’t come true, but the world has dramatically changed since I was 12 years old.
Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn gave a talk recently that looked at the future. He acknowledged that we didn’t have flying cars, but we have had something that has changed our world: data. He looked at the early web, anonymous and slow and the 2.0 model of social interaction and offline identities moving online. It’s hard to know where the next evolution of the web will go, but I think that the dramatic explosion of data will be a part of it.
We collect so much data, and there is a tremendous call for the analysis and aggregation of that data. We seem to be fascinated, and driven by the regular presentation of information. For a long time that involved numbers, but there is tremendous growth in new presentation techniques that blend data, using colors and shapes to help us understand. It’s amazing how much people even want to manipulate the data, especially when some gesture-based, iPad-like interface is involved.
For the data professional this is great news. Our skills will be in demand, and there is tremendous opportunity in learning how to better gather, store, analyze, and present data. Our RDBMS systems have grown to encompass an amazing array of tools to assist us, and if you need something that isn’t built in, there are so many vendors providing tools and utilities that make almost anything possible.
We live in an age of data, one that I find very exciting.
Steve Jones
In the United States today I usually Tax Day, or the day that personal income taxes are due to be filed with the government. In 2011 you get an extension to Apr 18, but for all practical purposes, this is the day that most people have planned on filing your taxes.
With that in mind I thought I might take a break from technical discussions and polls and ask a question that might be let us know how many of you feel about your career this year. The poll for this week is:
Supposedly the economy is doing a little better worldwide, and companies are making more IT investments. I have even heard of a few friends getting bonuses in the past year for performance by their employer. If you look back to 2010, or even 2009, do you feel better about your job and your career? Do you have more security? Do you have better compensation? Are your prospects looking better for the future?
I am not a technical DBA right now, but my employer is doing well and I think my position is more secure. As I survey the DBA market, it also seems the are more positions available in my area with a wide variety of companies. If I did need to change jobs, I have a lot of confidence that I could find something else.
Hopefully most of you feel that your career is doing better this year than last, but let us know this Friday. If it’s not, perhaps someone will give you some advice to help you improve the situation for next year.
Steve Jones
If the Gartner Group is correct, and we are looking at a workplace that is more dynamic, more disconnected, more virtual, and involves us working with many more people that we are not very familiar with, are you prepared? Do you know how to work with a team that might come together in a short period of time and disband a few months later? Do you know which people in your company you like working with, and perhaps more importantly, which ones you don’t?
The idea of swarming teams that come together for projects and then disbanding them is one of Gartner’s predictions for the workplace over the next decade. I met someone recently who works at a company that is trying some of these techniques. People are working in virtual teams, and it seems to be working well.
Some time ago I was giving a talk on the Modern Resume, and someone asked me what they should do on LinkedIn or any social networking site. This person had signed up and didn’t know what to do after that. My response was to start networking with people, which is a hard thing for many people. I had to go back and spend some time thinking about what networking really is, reading a little about the topic, and coming up with a list of things that you can do to build your network online.
I think social networking is an interesting skill that might become more valuable as we interact with an ever increasing number of people in a virtual sense. Whether your company decides to implement swarms and virtual teams, there are plenty of opportunities to meet other professionals in your field outside of work, and many of these opportunities are over social networks like LinkedIn or Twitter.
Steve Jones
