Tag: career

At every company I’ve ever worked, it’s been easy to tell the high performers from the low ones. There’s often a correlation between those the level of performance and the satisfaction people have in their jobs. Higher performers are often happy, and low performers are not. That isn’t necessarily 100% true, but it has seemed to work that way in most of my jobs.

I don’t know if there’s any causality there. Are people happier because they do better I their jobs? Or if they find something in which they excel, does that make them happier? I think it’s a case of people having some level of passion about their work, that the work is important to them, and that makes them more willing to do the work and excel at it.

I recently read Drive, by Dan Pink, and it was a book that really made me rethink the world and how I view it. The book talks about motivation and the ways that we humans are motivated to work at something. The book challenges the assumptions that most companies have used to drive workers over the last few decades: monetary rewards for high performance and punishments for a lack of effort.

It’s a hard concept to understand, much less buy into, but there is this idea that humans like to work, that we need a task, and more importantly, we need a purpose in our lives. There is some truth to that, and I think that many experiments have shown that the majority of people will get work done, and people do want to work. You can count on people to actually do their jobs, especially in technology where we seem to enjoy solving problems and making things run efficiently.

Not everyone is self motivated or self directed, but I think many people can be trusted to get work done, especially once they understand why it’s necessary.

If you want and interesting book about business, give Drive a try, or check out this cool animation of Mr. Pink’s talk on the subject.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

• Windows Media Podcast – MB WMV
• iPod Video Podcast – 15.9MB MP4
• MP3 Audio Podcast – 3.7MB MP3

It’s hard to believe that I have been running SQLServerCentral for almost ten years. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it, hope I get to do it another ten years, and am thankful every day for having one of the best jobs in the world. It fits me well, and surprisingly, it’s a job I never expected to have as recent as 12 years ago.

When I started working full time for SQLServerCentral, I also started my telecommuting career. I hadn’t ever worked outside of an office on a regular basis before that time, and now I wouldn’t want to ever go back to an office full time. Aside from all the benefits of a flexible schedule and more time with my kids, the most valuable part of working at home is the lack of a commute.

IBM had a global commuter pain study recently, and this short video on eWeek highlights some of the results. I thought it was great that the study recognizes that there is pain involved in commuting, and the study talks about more than just lost time. There is evidence to support the idea that workers’ health is actually lowered over time from the stress and traffic issues in many cities.

I firmly believe that investing in your health is very important for your future. If you can reduce the stress and the time spent on unproductive actions, like sitting in traffic,  you might actually find that you enjoy your job, and your life, more.

Many managers don’t want to let employees work remotely, but you should try to convince them to let you try it. Gather stories that prove remote workers are productive, or ask to implement a pilot program. Try to prove to your manager that you can be effective a day or two a week. After all, many of you are effective away from the office when you’re on call. Why not get permission to  extend that to a few other time periods during the week.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

• Windows Media Podcast – 22.4MB WMV
• iPod Video Podcast – 16.1MB MP4
• MP3 Audio Podcast – 3.7MB MP3

This is interesting. Another case of corporate fraud under the title of “What Sarbanes-Oxley Won’t Do”. Apparently someone got loans, blah, blah, fraud, blah, blah, etc. You get the idea and I’m tired of having to hear and write about it.

But since S-O affects most IT groups and many of us are dealing with it, it’s worth talking about and writing about. S-O has required more documentation, processes, and accountability for how corporations deal with their financial data. It is intended to prevent another Enron or MCI like occurence by making high level executives accountable for the company’s actions.

But it doesn’t prevent fraud. It doesn’t prevent dishonesty, and it certainly doesn’t guarentee that your investment is safe in some company. It should make it easier to send people to jail, but even that hasn’t been shown to be the case yet.

It does, however, make a lot of work for many companies. I was talking with a professional services company recently and they said that many of their clients, public and private, are trying to adhere to S-O because public companies have to, but private ones are either looking for an IPO or to be bought by a larger company, and S-O compliance is often part of the due diligence they’d need.

If you’re an ISO company, you probably can use one set of docs for both certifications, although you’ll need to dive deeper in certain areas for each one. That’s the good thing since we know how much you IT folks love documenting your processes, procedures, and environments.

I’m just happy to say that SQLServerCentral.com is not complying and I, for one, am thrilled 🙂

Steve Jones

(published at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Editorial/72358/)