Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Overwhelmed, Stress, and Planning

    It’s been a bit hectic this year. In fact, it feels crazy most weeks as I try to manage work, home life, and free time. More and more I have been having a night or two a week where I just want to lay in bed and watch some TV to unwind. I even find myself ignoring email on the weekends, which is something I never used to do. If I could process something in a minute, I’d rather just handle it.

    However when stress hits, and you feel like there’s too much to do, it’s good to be able to let things go, or at least delay them for a bit. And that’s what I’ve trying. I’m slightly behind on articles, and likely need to send a few apology letters to authors.

    I started to free up time for next year, anticipating that I might be doing more volunteer work. When that fell through, I started to direct that energy elsewhere, looking for other community engagements. However that started to grow like crazy, and I once again find myself slightly overwhelmed.

    My son has karate 3 nights a week (as do I), my daughter had 2 days of volleyball a week, and my wife has had a few trips, which mean I have horse chores. I’ve been to a few SQL Saturdays lately, and have one more in addition to the SQL Connections and PASS Summit coming up next month. Then there’s ski season. It’s one of the ways I try to get away from work and manage stress, and I look forward to it. But it means that I have to prep for the time off.

    I would like to get to more community events in 2011, but I am starting to wonder if I will. The SQL Saturdays are short trips, but the time away adds up and I’d like to actually slow down a bit next year and take on less project stuff.

    There’s more to life than work, and I’m trying to remember that. Hopefully more of you remember that as well and ensure you have a good balance in life. It’s good to recognize when you’re out of balance and look to correct the situation. I’m not sure what I will do, but I am aware that I need to plan on doing something different next year.

  • The Growth of Professional Development

    When I started in my career, it seemed that there wasn’t a good way to grow your career. Myself, and many others, somewhat fumbled around, looking for jobs with bigger databases or more money. We thought that learning to be the best at a particular technology was the way to grow your career. That or go into management, something very few of us were interested in.

    Most people I worked with took a job with the expectation that they’d be there forever. When that didn’t work out, they started applying for other jobs, hoping the next one would be the last they’d need for a long time. Managing one’s career was something you did by updating a resume and asking your friends if they knew of any jobs, along with the random learning that comes from new projects or reading magazines.

    I’ve been amazed in the last 4-5 years to see so many people taking a more active role in their own careers, spending more time on a regular basis managing their careers. I have been giving a presentation on The Modern Resume for a couple years and I find more and more people interested in attending and finding new ways to formalize their professional development. Not everyone will actually make the effort,  but new tools like social networking sites make it easier, and I regularly find more people that are spending time on the professional development in their lives.

    I recently submitted a pre-conference session to the upcoming SQL Rally event next May with Chris Shaw that deals with Finding Your Dream Job. I am still surprised that it was accepted, but it seems more and more people want to get career related information along with the technical sessions at various events. Voting is open for the sessions, which will be an interesting test in and of itself. Are there enough people that will pay for a professional development session alongside the other technical sessions submitted? Grant Fritchey has a great one on Query Tuning and Brian Kelley has one on security. Tough competition.

    Whether or not Chris’ and my session is accepted doesn’t matter. I’m excited that the topic is even under consideration, and that there are two other great sessions from Joe Webb and Kevin Kline. I would urge you to vote, and vote honestly. Let us know what you truly think is worth paying for and valuable for your career.

    Steve Jones

  • The Hybrid

    I’m off to SQL Server Connections next week and looking forward to the conference. This is my first time attending, but I have wanted to go for some time. This is one of the few events that is not specifically focused on one technology. In fact, it’s actually 7 conferences in one, co-locating events on ASP.NET, Silverlight, SQL Server, Visual Studio, Sharepoint, Windows, and Exchange.

    It seems that more and more of us working in information technology are called upon to work with a variety of products and platforms. While you might primarily be a DBA that deals with T-SQL or SQL Server administration, you probably are called upon to use other skills as well. You might need to help with Windows security, or Exchange administration, or even do some .NET development. As wide as the SQL Server platform is, it seems that often we have the need for skills with other technologies.

    Even if you don’t actually work in other areas because of regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, understanding those other technologies can really help your career. You might better understand how to integrate SQL Server into your environment or better secure an application. You might even be able to offer ideas that  help a co-worker in their job troubleshoot a problem.

    I’ve felt that the most talented people in IT usually have a varied background and understand a wide variety of technologies. They bring that wide view of the forest to bear on a problem, and often find a solution because they can think laterally and are not tied down to the boundaries of a specific product.

    Steve Jones

  • Efficiency

    There was a debate recently about older IT workers and the fact that there is some age discrimination going on in this industry. While that’s probably true, it happens in other fields as well. Especially blue collar fields where the amount of work done often relates to some physical activity. Older workers might make less, or be paid less, because they do the job differently.

    Without getting into the debate about age discrimination, I wanted to get a feel for how you feel about your career progressing. I’m sure those of you in your 20s can’t conceive of being 60 and programming any differently than you do now, but times will change for you.

    One of my feelings is that there is a lot of value in experience. The latest .NET changes aren’t harder to use or understand than the previous ones, and the changes to T-SQL bring about new things to learn, but they aren’t really any more complex than previous features, commands, and constructs. For this Friday, I wanted to ask this:

    Are you becoming more efficient as you progress in you career?

    Maybe you can answer how you are getting more efficient. Are you developing skills that allow you to produce higher quality code in less time?

    I hope that most of you are, and the explosion of blogs, books, and events like SQLSaturday mean that you have more chances than ever to learn how to become more efficient in whatever type of technology you work with in your career.

    Steve Jones