Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Taking Advantage of Conferences

    I’ve been very lucky in life to go to many conferences throughout my career. I’ve gone as both an attendee and a speaker, and I have found them to be valuable in helping me continue to grow and thrive in my career. This is across many employers, some of which I don’t think had particularly great benefits. Plenty of people I worked with did not get to attend any conferences, and some of them felt resentful. I understand that, but I think that many employers are willing to invest in training and conferences when there is a return for them.

    I started going to ComNet in DC, as a young professional wanting to learn. It was close enough to drive up and go for the free day and then return home. A few colleagues and I would make the trip once a year and talk with vendors, chat with attendees, and learn more about computer networking. Across a couple of years, we had moved from thinnet and thicknet to ethernet and IPX to IP, and this was a place where those technologies, and many more, were being discussed.

    During (and after) the event, I worked hard and improved my knowledge. I got things done at work. I got extra things done at work. I got my normal work done better. I solved more problems than in the past. Part of this was growing and learning, part was improving my troubleshooting, research, and testing skills.

    Some of it was meeting a few people at a conference I could email later and ask a question.

    As I changed jobs, I moved more into development and data work. I got the chance to go to TechEd and the PDC. I became involved in PASS and started attending the annual summit. I learned a lot in different sessions, and I made a lot of networking contacts with others. Many became friends, and many of them have helped me answer questions since then. I learned to not just attend a conference, but bring something back. Usually knowledge and always some swag to give out to co-workers. A gift for the boss that approved the trip was also a good idea.

    I continue to do this today. I often attend a SQL Saturday and sit in a few sessions. I still learn something that I can write about or help a client with. I might take a moment to ask a speaker a question that likewise gives me knowledge that I can use in my day job. There’s a payback for my employer when they’ve spent money for me to attend. There’s also a payback for my career as I’m always learning something new.

    This fall is the annual PASS Data Community Summit. It’s in-person, which I know limits who can go, but if you’re looking to be a high performer. If you get things done at work and your company values you, perhaps you can make a case that you are the person that will take advantage of a conference. Convincing others that you’re worth investing in, and proving you are, is a good skill to have. Take your best shot at it, and maybe you’ll get the chance to register and come. If not, the worst case is someone says no but learns that you want to drive your career forward.

    PS – Don’t delay. Prices rise on Sep 21.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Using Clear Language to Avoid Confusion

    A long time ago a software engineer advised me to try and ensure that I made my interfaces clear to users, especially those that are busy focusing on some other task the software enables. The phrase he used was to make a “Fisher-Price” interface, referring to the toy company that makes big and brightly colored buttons for their toys. The idea being that we didn’t want to cram too many things on the screen or possibly confuse a user.

    As a kid, I watched Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood on television and enjoyed the show. Lots of kids had a similar view, but they might not have known that the main actor took care in choosing his words to convey concepts and ideas to children. In fact, the former producer said that the writers joked that his manner of speaking was its own language, called “Freddish.”

    I saw an article that talks about the care Fred Rogers took in explaining things, with examples of how he made choices in how to communicate with his audience. The piece got me thinking about not only Fisher-Price interfaces, but also the language that we use to communicate with developers when we ask them to build something.

    Often I find in software development that we use a model or a shortcut to represent what we want. We partially describe something, or we assume that the words we choose mean the same thing to us and the other party. This goes both ways, with developers needing to be clear with their clients (and each other) and clients needing to be clear with developers.

    I don’t think I’d advocate for adopting Freddish, but I do think that we ought to pay attention to the words we choose, especially when we find the end result isn’t quite what is expected. Examining where the design went wrong and if we could communicate differently, or more often, earlier in the process to avoid problems.

    Communication is a difficult skill. I find constant examples at work, in my hobbies, even within my family where someone says one thing, but means another.

    To me. To themselves, they feel perfectly clear. Context, innuendo, implication, we depend on these a lot in communications, but those can cause issues when we aren’t very familiar with others. As we move to remote work, as we find less bonds with our co-workers because we don’t see the same body language, as we don’t eat meals together, as we don’t often share a context of work, we need to be more careful about the words we use and find ways to ensure we all are saying the same thing that the other person hears.

    Steve Jones

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

  • What Have You Done Lately Outside of Work?

    I was chatting with someone recently that’s younger than me. They’ve got a good job and had some success learning, but they felt like their career wasn’t progressing fast enough. This person still wanted to grow their career and their income. That’s the place many people find themselves.

    This individual was asking my advice since they thought I’d had some success and were looking for me to share some of the things that worked for me. I asked them this question: What have you done lately outside of work for your career?

    They hadn’t done really anything, which is fine. This person has a partner, hobbies, and has found some balance in life. They were enjoying themselves, which is great. I love people having balance in life.

    However.

    If you want to move faster in your career than others, you have to do more. I don’t mean work 90 hours a week or spend every night on a project. However, I grew my career with work outside of work. Brent Ozar did the same thing. Many of the speakers you see at conferences and Microsoft MVPs did the same thing. They put in extra hours to grow their skills and knowledge.

    I know lots of you work a lot, and you have family/friend/spiritual commitments. I get that. However, I’m sure most of you aren’t working the coal miner’s schedule. If you have hobbies or fun time, that’s great, but can you carve out some time from those to invest in your career? Brent has time management skills advice, and I’ve written about this as well. Doctors, lawyers, even auto mechanics work on their skills when they aren’t getting paid by someone. They do this as an investment in the future.

    As I move towards the end of my career, I do less (especially this year), but I still read some books that help grow my skills in areas Redgate cares about. I do some training for coaching to improve there. I do less for my career than I used to, but I still do something outside of work.

    Answer my question today. What have you done lately outside of work for your career?

    Steve Jones

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

  • T-SQL Tuesday #165–Job Titles

    tsqltuesdayThis  T-SQL Tuesday is from a new host, Josephine Bush, leader of the Boulder group just North of me. It’s an interesting invitation, asking what our job titles really mean. I like this as the titles do affect how our industry advances and what opportunities are available to us.

    I manage the tsqltuesday party, so if you want to host, ping me.

    The DBA

    When I was a software developer, I worked with a DBA that made a lot of $$$. That was very attractive to me. So, I pursued that title. There were few of them in any company, and I needed to learn SQL, modeling, performance, etc. but once I got to that point, I found it was a good job.

    These days I see some companies with DBAs, but lots of the customers I work with don’t have DBAs as a title and have some sysadmin or developer doing those jobs.

    New Titles

    The invitation shows other titles, but often what I see is titles are for HR and pay levels. The job often is very similar. I see DBAs/Database Engineers/Database Reliability Engineer, often doing very similar work. They might watch over servers with admin stuff (backup/security, etc). They might do DevOps, IaaC, deployments, they might also do modeling and consulting with devs.

    Database Developer is something I see often, sometimes with BI developer, and often they do the same work. The former might do more T-SQL on OLTP systems and the latter might only want to work with BI/OLAP/warehouse systems. However, I find people who want to limit themselves are limiting opportunities and might be those that don’t hold onto a job for a long time. That being said, I do find some BI developers might not have access to all development databases, but database developers often do.

    I’ve seen a few data scientists. They’ve been around for years, there has been a big push to get them to work on ML/AI systems, and I see less of that in the last few years as there AI tech grows and gets more commoditized. It doesn’t seem that as many companies want to pay highly for this role. I have no idea what they do other than lots of ETL and experiments to try and get a computer to make better decisions from data.

    Architects – I know a few people that have this role, but I don’t see a lot of them. These are usually people that evaluate tech, set standards, and try to oversee a common direction for database designs or tech, however, I also find these people need to be doing other work to justify their existence. They often fill in where work is needed.

    In general, I think titles sometimes reflect a specialization of a portion of technology, but aren’t necessarily needed. I’ve been a DBA and done all the things the invitation lists for various roles. However, I find that if I wanted to be a database engineer rather than a database administator, I could likely justify a higher salary.

    My advice is pick the title that has a good salary and aim for it. Learn all the skills, since the title might not matter when someone needs work done.