Tag: career

Last year I went to THAT Conference in Wisconsin. It was a fun event, very community and family-friendly, and I enjoyed it. So much so that I recently went back to the Texas event in January. It’s more developer-focused, but it does have some data related sessions. I recommend this conference if you’re looking for some fun training and want to combine that with a family vacation. Your kids will love it.

In any case, I watched a keynote talk that referenced an NPR article, called Mind over Milkshake. It’s an interesting look at how the food labels affected people’s bodies. It’s not definitive and I wouldn’t make any drastic changes based on this, but it is an interesting read on the idea your mind and thoughts can influence your body. I’ve heard about the effect of placebos in the past, we well as attitude on healing, so this makes some sense.

I don’t know to what extent this would change how I manage my health and medical care, but I do think a similar idea is important in my work with databases. I see lots of people who have a negative attitude towards learning, change, or even adopting new/better ways of doing things. So many people, whether workers or management, get stuck in a rut and want to stay there. Or they don’t feel empowered to change. It’s why I find the cultural part of DevOps way more challenging in organizations than the technology part.

In some of my management positions, I’ve often challenged workers not to bring problems, but to find solutions. I want them to view the issues we face, the things that go wrong, as opportunities to improve, not set-in-stone problems that we gripe about. I know many chronic issues recur regularly. I also know that in any organization, there can be resistance to change, and a “we’ve always done it that way” attitude. However, adopting that for yourself is how things continue to linger on (or get worse).

Your mindset can make a huge difference in how you approach situations, including how much stress you feel from the environment. I don’t advocate change for change’s sake, but I do look to critically evaluate if something works well or can be improved. I’ve also learned to ask for change and that being turned down doesn’t mean that nothing changes. Or nothing ever well, or even this thing won’t change. It often means that this particular thing can’t change, or that it can’t change now. I have also learned to separate this request from another request for a different change. The key is often to analyze the solution, prepare a good reason why something should change, and present this un-emotionally.

I know when I approach things as an opportunity life is better. Even if I don’t make a difference, or I don’t like the outcome, I feel better about it. Try it, and you might feel the same way.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

In the last few years, I’ve noticed that the quality of technical workers can vary quite a bit in many organizations. I think most people get things done, but often not at a high-quality level. It’s one reason that I write, speak, and try to motivate more of you to work on your skills and your career. I want to see better software being built.

I tend to work with more database developers than application developers and I tend to see more SQL code than C#/Java/etc. And I see a lot of poorly written SQL Code and poor data models that seem to have been built without a lot of thought put into them. Whether this is because of ignorance or just poor skills is hard to know, but I see a lot of code that makes me slightly cringe.

Over time, many of us see that this technical debt limits our ability to improve things or make changes. Often these systemic issues linger because the development staff a) doesn’t know how to fix them, b) has other, higher priorities, or c) is afraid to try and make changes. Often it’s a combination of all three, which further limits the agility of the database and application teams. We end up struggling to keep up with customer demands, or we may pile on more and more technical debt. Often this leads to increased performance problems in the database.

I was reading about development and staffing in this piece, which had an interesting quote: “I currently believe that there’s only one way to buy yourself out of technical issues and bad data models, and that’s buying a really talented engineer whose sole focus is fixing the problem.” Essentially, you need to do two things here. First, hire a smart engineer, and second, empower them to effect change. In many cases, I think you actually need two smart engineers: one database engineer and one application software engineer. Those people have to focus on improvements, refactoring bad data models and the code that depends on them, and slowly raising the level of quality.

The piece gets a little sidetracked with the way vendors promise their products will fix your problems. In general, that’s not true, at least not without you adapting your process to their software. In my role, I’m careful not to promise more than I can deliver, and not try to minimize the effort required to change. I know it’s somewhere between using 10% time and a major overhaul, and I hope I convey that to clients.

Ultimately, I think that we haven’t commoditized lots of software development, which is the point of the piece and the quote above. We need to get talented people, or we need to train them, or both. We need people that enjoy their jobs and find some purpose or satisfaction. Part of that is making their jobs more interesting and enjoyable.

That also means there are many opportunities if you learn to be good at your job. Learn to build good data models. Keep up your skills that write efficient code, learn how to troubleshoot, and learn how to work well with others. None of those are easy skills to develop, nor are they quick to learn, but they can be learned with some effort. Document your progress, blog/write/speak, and I bet you’ll find your career prospects improving.

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It seems I’ve heard from a lot of people looking for jobs lately. I had a friend reach out and when I posted a note on LinkedIn I had someone looking for a job, I heard from a few dozen others that they were in the same situation. The last year has seen a lot of turnover in IT. There have been lots of big (and small) companies that have let staff go, for a variety of reasons. The why doesn’t matter to you if you’ve lost employment. You just need a new job.

At the same time, I hear from lots of customers and friends that they are struggling to find good talent. They have openings, but none of the people interviewing have good skills.

That’s an interesting mix of situations. There are jobs and companies want to hire people, and there are people needing jobs. However, there don’t seem to be enough good matches, and my guess is we have some skills mismatches here. In other words, candidates aren’t showing they have the skills employers need, or at least not at the depth employers need.

A lot of success I’ve had in the past is being good at some tasks with a database, but also showing employers I can learn about other tasks easily. Some of that is from blogs or answers on forums, and some of that is showcasing those skills in interviews. I think that many managers will accept they might need to teach you or train you on certain things, but they want confidence you can learn and grow.

Good interview soft skills help, but showcasing learning and growth helps as well. Blogging is a good way to show that, but what do you blog about? My advice to students is to explain how they solve the problems they’re given in coursework. Show what you learned, from where, and how you chose to solve a problem with the resources used.

I would say that experienced workers can do the same thing. Take on some sample projects that build or design a database. Work on a sample dataset and produce queries to answer questions, explaining what the goal is and then how you solve the problem. Show how you can improve a project by refactoring code, and then proving things are better with execution plans and performance numbers.

Show you have skills to get some things done, and the skills to learn how to solve complex problems. Hiring managers need to have this confidence in you.

If you have ideas for a project, let us know in a comment. What types of projects have you worked on that you were proud of the solution? What sample datasets have you used to learn? We all can improve our skills in some way, and perhaps a few specific ideas will get some of you moving in the new year.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.