Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Living Moore’s Law

    I’m not much of a hardware geek these days. For the most part I just want my computers to work. Actually if I think about it, I really just want my services to work. I don’t care what specs they have, or the technology used.

    If I went back to managing databases, I would be looking for databases to work on, not individual machines. I think that’s one reason that the idea of cloud database services appeals to me. Not necessarily clouds on the Internet, but as a series of machines in my data center that I could just plug together and have SQL Server run various services across them.

    In reading a little about eBay and their new data center, I think it might be very cool to work there. The director of their data center talks about living Moore’s Law, with the new data center in Utah. While I’m sure many of the large internet companies like Microsoft, Google, Rackspace, etc. would also be interesting, I’m not sure how many of them are on a two year cycle, replacing all of their systems on a rotating basis.

    I live on a 35 acre ranch, and it’s a lot of work keeping it up. That can help me appreciate the scale of the new eBay data center, which is a 60 acre campus. Their phase one approach has 7.2MW of server load in the building with some racks generating over 30,000W of heat. That’s quite a hot aisle!

    At that pace of change, I have to think that it’s both exciting and a challenge to keep systems running on new hardware and also modifying code to take advantage of the new capabilities offered by hardware changes. It’s a challenge that I would love to tackle at some point in my life.

    Steve Jones

  • Differences

    Are women the same or different as men? They’re different, without a doubt, and I have very much enjoyed reading the thoughts of a few women that I greatly respect this week in our guest editorials. Each of these ladies has eloquently expressed their views on women in the workplace and today I am looking to wrap up this week of focusing on women in technology with my own thoughts on the topic.

    Women are different than men. I think it’s wonderful and I am thankful that we are different. The synergies that make this an amazing world come from the variety of people in it. It doesn’t matter if they’re men or women, having white or brown skin, speaking English or Chinese, or whether they like chocolate or cheese. It’s the infinite variety of people that make this a better world.

    We have to learn to embrace that. Despite our prejudices, we have to extend that tolerance to see the advantages of working alongside that different than yourself. As pointed out in one of Jen McCown’s references, studies have shown that diverse teams of men and women perform better. They are more productive, and they develop ideas that are more often used by others.

    Cultures around the world treat women differently than men. We view them differently and we often separate them out. Look at sports, where so many of us bond in our youth. Men are often physically superior, and participate in different, often more violent sports. That seems to have carried over into business at times. We mistake physical superiority at a game implying that a person better able to handle business. I don’t think that’s true, and I think it takes time, discussion, and awareness to combat that.

    Then there’s sex. No one touched on it this week, but sex, love, emotions evoked by others are a part of our workplace. They shouldn’t be, but how can you get away from it? We can’t help being attracted to whoever we are attracted to, and we often don’t handle that well. It doesn’t matter if our feelings are reciprocated or rebuffed; we seem to struggle with them. Even if we don’t act on it, the locker room jokes and attitudes that many men display can carry over into their interactions with women. I have no idea how to get past this, and I think it’s something that we have to somehow learn to live with, and try not to let it interfere with our professional attitudes.

    We don’t hire someone just based on their skill at a job. If we did, we could just devise some test and hire the person with the best score, or the score above some level. We are hiring someone to do more than just write code; we’re hiring them to work with others, interact with them, and get along. The means that we will subjectively make decisions about who we’d like to work with.

    Which means getting past our prejudices. Understanding our human frailty in judging people and embracing our diversity.

    Steve Jones

  • Career Warfare – Book Review

    70618861[1] I picked up Career Warfare on the recommendation of a friend that had seen the Modern Resume presentation. I grabbed it as an e-book and have been reading it for the last few months, at a fairly slow pace (for me).

    I often read a book in a week, but in the case of this one, I would read part of a chapter, and spend a day or so thinking about it. Digesting the information, and seeing how it might be applicable to my career, and my brand.

    The author, David D’Alessandro rose to CEO of John Hancock Insurance, and you have to keep that in mind. The book is written as a tool for how you might advance your career in corporate America, and it includes lessons for upper management, many of which don’t apply to most of us. Items like dealing with the press aren’t something the average person needs to think about.

    However there is some great advice in there about how you should grow your career, and the impact that you have on your career based on your actions.

    I highly recommend it, and there are a couple of great pieces of advice in there. Most importantly, you are always building your brand. Slowly, surely, but every day you go to work, or interact with people professionally, you are building your brand. I like that he stresses honesty and integrity as well.

    There are some things I don’t necessarily agree with, like not bringing your spouse to social events, or not drinking at all, but if you are attempting to rise to the C-level ranks, perhaps that’s good advice.

  • 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