Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • We Are Not a Meritocracy

    I’ve heard a few times over the last month that the technology business ought to be a meritocracy, where people are hired, promoted, and fired based on their skills and talents. It’s usually accompanied by a mandate that everyone should  “hire the best person for the job.”

    Information Technology may be the closest we get to a meritocracy, but it certainly isn’t one. Your skills matter, your talent matters, but it’s still a who you know and who-you-get-along-with that overrides everything else. More often than not, skills alone will not carry you far. You need to have a bond with the people that hire you.

    If we were a meritocracy, we could just give everyone a test that applied for a job and hire the person with the highest score. Or just use a lottery to pick everyone that achieved a certain score. That doesn’t sound like the kind of place that I’d like to work since I place a lot of value on the interpersonal relationships with other people.

    It seems that most people really want their employees, or co-workers, to meet some minimum level of competency, continue to improve their skills, and do their share of the work. That’s reasonable and I can appreciate those qualities in people, but the thing that’s most important to me is that we get along.

    I can work with you to improve your technical skills, but I can’t usually do anything about your personality.

    Steve Jones

  • Costing Cool Projects

    I ran across this article on how accounting can kill innovation, basically talking about the issues of applying our standard accounting rules and ROI calculations to innovative ideas. When an idea is too new, or too different, applying estimates of returns and value are often wildly incorrect.

    A study showed that when strict financial controls were not applied at the beginning, but rather decisions were made along the way to continue investing in projects, there were more likely to be positive  returns from the project.

    This approach seems to be one that could be useful in many BI type projects, and to a large extent, seems to be a good use of Powerpivot as a way to prototype projects. Assemble some data by hand, making a limited investment, and then determine if further investment is warranted.

    Companies often follow similar paths, with similar software and the differentiators between can turn out to be the innovation of the people inside the company. Making a case for innovation, with limited investment and small prototypes can be a great way to work on something interesting while potentially making yourself a very valuable employee to keep around.

    Steve Jones

  • What You Practice

    37slogo-transI saw a very interesting blog at 37 Signals on the quote “the things you do more often are the things you get good at.” It’s aimed more at a business model, talking about the idea of building a service for free without having an idea of how to later convert that to profit.

    However I think there is something else here. For most of us, outside of running our own business, the things we do most often are the things that we are interested in, or that speak to us. They are the things we like, and if we are self-aware, we recognize these things and look to build them into our life.

    Life is short, and your career is a big part of that. I recommend that you understand what you like to do, and then find a way to do more of it in your career. And enjoy your job more.

  • Changing Jobs

    I interact with a lot of people about their jobs, both online and at various events like SQL Saturdays. With my Modern Resume presentation, I attract a lot of people that are interested in finding a new job, or sometimes just finding any job. Apparently these are not an out of the ordinary group of people. According to a ComputerWorld survey, over one third of respondents are looking to find a new job.

    The last few years have been a hard economy for many people, and for many companies. Raises have been small or non-existent, layoffs have occurred, and it seems that IT workers must do more and more with less resources all the time. Those are not necessarily conditions that make for happy workers.

    But is it time for a job change for you? Only you can really answer that question for yourself, but I would urge you to open a dialog inside your company if the answer is “yes.” Either with your immediate boss, or perhaps with another department, and look for some way to make your job better. Find new duties, rotate into some other area, or tackle a project of interest to you. There are some very difficult managers out there, but most of them would rather retain you if they can. Finding new employees is a pain.

    More money doesn’t usually help you enjoy your job more. I’ve rarely had any friends think that they made a good decision when they took a job primarily because it paid more. Instead the people that are most happy are those that picked the job that best fit them, without worrying about the money. I’m certainly one of those; I took a pay cut to get this job years ago.

    Life is short. Don’t stay in, or take, a crappy job if you can avoid it.

    Steve Jones