Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Career Plan for 2024

    It’s a holiday today, but I’m dropping this as I spent last week working on it. I wrote about having a career plan on Friday, with a few notes in there on how I was viewing my career in 2024. This post will cover a little more of my thoughts on the future (for me) and my plan.

    Note: I’m mid-50s, and my career is closer to being over than beginning, so take this with a grain of salt if you’re in your 40s or younger.

    Thoughts on My Career in 2024

    I tried goals for a number of years, but those are hard for me to work on through a year for a few reasons. One is that my view in Dec/Jan is not always one that continues through the year, at least not with my job. Second, I start to get focused on the goals and it creates stress and pressure that I don’t need. Rather that improving in an area, I’m driven by the goal.

    I don’t like that.

    I also find my career is evolving more rapidly in the 2020s in the past, with each year moving me in new directions that are tangentially related, but hard for me to build goals in since both me and my employer are learning new ways to use my talents throughout the year.

    I’m closer to the end of my career, with roughly 10 years—ish left. I’m also doing more work with customers as an architect and advisor rather than a marketer. I find my time is spent more with sales than marketing or engineering, and I both need new skills there, but I also have to focus my time in different areas.

    Lastly, a portion of my job is still journalism, running SQL Server Central, so I need to remain aware and learning about the state of the data professional in the world.

    With that in mind, I’m setting plans in motion to help me in those areas, without goals. Just a direction. I think that’s a new approach for me, where I look to find time to grow in a direction, but without the pressure of a goal. If I have to skip some sessions or alter the direction, I can do that easier by altering the direction rather than trying to abandon one goal and find a new one.

    Think of this as finding a new route while on a road trip rather than being driven by the time of arrival.

    The 2024 Plan

    Where do I want to be in a year? Here are the things that come to mind:

    • Produce a specific content on Redgate technical issues or architecture recommendations that I upload to our Seismic site.
    • Learn how to use all the Flyway commands well from the CLI so I can make good recommendations for flow and using them
    • Learn to use static code analysis tools and create custom rules in a pipeline
    • Be comfortable enough with AI to use it every week

    That might be too much, but the first 3 are really related to my job, so I’ll be getting career growth out of them and I can spend some of my time at work focusing in this direction. These are areas I’m interested in and having a direction to produce these learnings as documents shared within the company will force me to learn them a bit better.

    The last one about AI is not because I think AI is great, but because I’m still unsure of how or where to use it. I have some coursework on AI from Microsoft that I’m going to go through and try to better understand what’s happening, what’s involved with training, and how I can prompt better. I think this will be a good tool at some point, if not for writing code, perhaps for other things.

    That’s my plan, now, what’s yours?

  • The 2024 Plan

    Today is the last working day of 2023. Next week we start with the New Year’s holiday on Monday and then many of us go back to work, starting a new year. This is the time of year where many people make New Year’s Resolutions, most of which will be abandoned by March. Some of you might keep to your goals, but it is hard to make substantial changes in your life all at once, especially based on a calendar date.

    Instead of making a resolution this weekend, I would suggest that you think about your career and sketch the outline of a plan. Having a plan is a good way to approach the new year, one that I think might be better than setting goals without a plan. It’s easy to set goals, but without a concrete approach to attacking those goals, I think it becomes difficult to meet them, and more importantly, difficult to drive your career in the direction that makes it better for you.

    I heard some good advice from Brent Ozar at SQL Saturday Boston 2023. He said a good way to build a plan is to think where you would like to be in a year. What would you like to know? Or what skill would improve your career? What do you think would impress your boss? I’m sure most of you working in technology would like to make more money or find a better employer but those are the results after becoming a better data professional, not the plan.

    In a year, I think you can easily spend 50 hours working on your career, in an hour a week. Two hours a week is doable, but it can be hard to do more with a busy life, especially if you have family. However, you can make a couple of scheduled times a week to spend 15, 30, or 60 minutes on something in your career. Consider it a hobby and discuss how and when you’ll find time with your partner and family. Put the times on your calendar and take the time to sit at a computer.

    As for what you work on, look at my questions above, and pick a technology/language/framework/tool/platform/etc. and start typing. Write code, build a server, read what others have written, and practice answering questions that others have asked on your topic, even if you don’t post the answer in a forum.

    In the beginning, it will be hard. You’ll feel like you aren’t accomplishing anything. You might feel like you’re just wasting time, but you’ll learn things and slowly you will be able to actually get something done. Whether you want to train AI models, write better T-SQL, or learn to manage Availability Groups like an expert.

    My last piece of advice is to write. Journal, blog, make notes, but write about what you’ve learned. Whether these are notes for yourself to review before an interview or published blogs that build your brand. Document your journey and I am sure you will be very proud of yourself on this date next year.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Building CyberSecurity Skills with an Advent Challenge

    I’ve been working on the Advent of Cyber challenge this December. It’s more of a walkthrough of some puzzles than it is solving them yourself, but it has given me a brush up on some skills and helped me learn some basics of how people in charge of (or looking to break) security look at the world. Plus it’s been a little fun with a silly storyline each day.

    The first challenge starts with a chatbot and trying to social engineer answers out of it. This was interesting to me, even though it was likely (hopefully) not a representative example of how AIs would work in most systems. However, it got me to think more about how I pose questions to an AI and how I can grow my prompts. The neat thing about AI is that you don’t have to ask the perfect question and then re-ask the same question with more info to get an answer. The AI keeps context in a conversation, which is way more powerful than previous Q&A search systems.

    The second day was Python and Jupyter Notebook basics, which were a nice refresher for me on a couple of concepts, but not that interesting. However, the third day introduced some password-cracking tools, the fourth day added other ones, and a few subsequent days showed some software that is devious in how it can be used to penetrate security. Other challenges have me the chance to brush up on Linux and network skills I hadn’t used in a long time.

    The SQL Injection module (day 10) is well done, and I might recommend most developers go through that to see why their easy, convenient build-a-sql-string-to-execute code is an incredibly bad idea. It’s also why they can’t also use stored procedures as built-up batch commands. Use the stored procedure objects to execute with named parameters.

    The idea of using a little plot and story, with a simple challenge to teach some skills is a good one. I’ve been lucky in my career to be exposed to a lot of different technologies and ways of working with systems. I’ve set up bridges, routers, and firewalls. I’ve had to get network links and cables to work and talk with different protocols, including configuring T1 connections. I’ve built machines, dealt with different types of local and remote storage, and had to program and administer systems at all levels of the OSI model. Does anyone remember that?

    This was a fun break from work, doing a module or two every other day, remembering there are a lot of complexities to our systems outside the database, or outside the application software. It’s also reminded me of all the different ways that security can be breached.

    Take the challenge and learn some new skills. I think many of you will learn something and you might enjoy yourself along the journey.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Focus on Growth in Your Career

    I find there to be a lot of value in actively managing your career. This is part of a series of editorials based on advice I’ve read from Raylene Yung (Facebook and Stripe) on your engineering career.

    I write a lot about growing your career. I think it’s important to find a good career, but also learn to be good at whatever you choose to do for employment. While I do think that learning is a skill and each of us ought to sharpen our saws, I sometimes find people chasing new things all the time. In this interview, I saw a great quote:

    “… while it’s important to be informed about the latest frameworks and best practices, learning this at the cost of developing fundamental skills is a bad tradeoff.”

    That’s something I imagine Jeff Moden saying about all the new technologies that get incorporated into database work. Often I find there are a lot of DBAs and database developers that want to implement PowerShell or MDX or Python because they can and not because it’s a good choice. Or perhaps more often because they aren’t as skilled in SQL as they should be.

    I am a fan of experimenting with different methods and determining if there is a better way to solve a problem. However, I am only a fan of using new techniques when they are better. Either they have to perform better (less resources or a lot less time to run), simplify the situation, or they save a ton of developer time. And not just your time, but for all other developers.

    One of the things noted in the interview above, as well as something I’ve seen, is that many younger people want to constantly try something new, without developing deep skills in any area. They often move in new directions because they can. I also see intermediate or senior engineers getting bored with their work or excited by something they read about and looking to shift everyone to a new platform/language/framework/etc.

    New can be better, but isn’t necessarily better. Instead, I might try to answer these questions from the article:

    • how can I make every code change great?
    • how can I be as good at X as someone on my team – For SQL, can you be as good as Jeff Moden or Itzik Ben-Gan? Or maybe closer to their level?

    The goal is to become better at your craft. Like the woodworker who improves their skills in shaping wood, or the chef becoming better at creating more tasty recipes, or maybe the weekend race car driver who learns to shave seconds off their lap times with improved driving technique.

    If it isn’t important to you to become the best in your team, maybe this will help. The cloud, AI, and competition from younger people will ensure that if you don’t improve your skills at all, you’ll slowly fall behind and your current manager, or the one that takes their place, might find a way to replace you with someone that does the job better, faster, and cheaper.

    Steve Jones

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