Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • 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.

  • The Value of Doing Something

    I live on a working horse ranch. My wife boards, trains, and trims horses and has employees. Occasionally I have to help out with chores, or more often, fixing things. I was talking with a coworker recently and showing some pictures. He was asking why I do things like tap a bolt instead of hiring someone to do it.

    I caught this excerpt from a book on cooking, which got me thinking. I don’t love the flow here, as it wanders between cooking, economics, politics, social justice, and more. However, the core ideas of specialization and taking on a task was what I got out of the piece.

    I work for a software company, and certainly, I make much more doing that than I save by cooking a meal or fixing a bolt. I could hire someone at much less than my hourly rate to do the work. Except, I don’t get paid more for working more. Maybe if I do more sales and get a quota, but for now an extra hour of work hasn’t helped me.

    Then there’s the satisfaction of getting something done. I talk and write and move bits around all day; nothing that has a tangible result. It can be satisfying but in a very different way than cooking or physically finishing a task. I actually like getting my hands dirty and seeing the results of my work. Seeing a new fence go up, a tree come down, or a repaired bolt brings about pride. I feel good when my family appreciates a tasty recipe and everyone cleans their plates. It’s a nice challenge.

    At the same time, routine maintenance, like changing oil, sometimes feels like doing an expense report. Needs to be done, it helps me, but there’s nothing very exciting about it.

    In the era of specialization, or even the era of automation and AI tools, it might seem that we don’t need to learn or work on anything outside of our area of expertise. I think it’s important to practice, learn, and use a variety of different skills. Even if I don’t need to write PoSh often, it is helpful to sometimes tackle work that needs doing. Each bit of new knowledge brings new understanding and appreciation for the work others do.

    It also helps me gain confidence in my ability to learn and use new technologies should the requirement arise. This has also served me in past jobs where I can step in and help others or even tackle a job when they aren’t available. This is something that I find far too many people struggling with. Either because of a lack of confidence or not having enough general skills that help them troubleshoot, build, or even support the vastly changing environments in which we work.

    Doing something old, new, challenging, or easy is good for all of us. Try something new, while you also appreciate and use the skills you have. Believe in your ability to learn and prove it to yourself on a regular basis.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Volunteering at Work: Teaching Others

    I give a few talks on career topics, and one of these is Branding Yourself for a Dream Job. In the talk, I sometimes tell a story in the volunteering section. I wanted to summarize that here, as a way to get you to think how you can do more at work and grow your brand substantially.

    A Young Worker

    I was a newly hired worker on a network team at a power plant. We supported everything from the computer network to servers to desktops to sensor devices. There were hundreds of people, over 1000 nodes, and just 5 of us. Needless to say we were busy, we had to think on our feet, and we built a lot of protocols to help us.

    We were the help desk and fielded a lot of calls from people, handling everything from password resets to reinstalling Windows to helping people work with various applications. I created a bunch of simple utilities (exes and batch scripts) that we kept on a share to help us solve common problems quickly. That was very helpful because we had a lot of repeated work.

    There was one person, I’ll call her Sarah, that called us regularly. She was an assistant in another department dealing with supplies of some sort. She had a lot of basic questions on using WordPerfect (remember this? ) and Lotus 1-2-3, often moving information to and from places and producing reports for her boss.

    We got the same questions over and over again, at least weekly if not daily. It got to the point where my entire team was so annoyed that we’d dodge her calls. This was 1991 and we had caller ID on the internal system. When she called, we’d pick up the call and immediately hand the phone to a coworker to deal with.

    This wasn’t the only person that created stress for our team, but this was the worst one. We were annoyed, and she was annoyed with us. Our feelings showed through and we gave her the minimum level of service, as slow as we could.

    Making a Difference

    I was as annoyed as everyone, but like with my utilities, I was looking for a way to make our team work more smoothly.

    At the time Windows was new and many people were intimidated with it. We had plenty of software that actually ran in a command window, like WordPerfect, while others ran as real windows (Lotus 1-2-3).

    I decided to try and fix things. I walked over to a remote building where Sarah worked. I’ve been there before to help with something, and likely my annoyance showed as she wasn’t thrilled to have me at her desk unannounced.

    I told her that I wanted to try and help her with some of the challenges with her position. I emphasized that a lot of people were struggling with these applications and I was trying to find ways to help them. I offered to bring her lunch and work through some things. At the time we were a remote station, and there was a Subway franchise that came in each day to do lunch. I said I’d buy sandwiches for a week.

    She agreed and I took her order. That simple empathy helped disarm her anger at the computer and my group.

    I bought lunch the next day and went over to Sarah’s desk. I watched her work, saw struggles, and then worked out some things to help her, created some notes she could keep around, and helped educate her.

    It took a week or two, but at the end of the time, she could self-service a lot of her issues without calling us.

    The Outcome

    First, I reduced the workload on my group. Everyone appreciated less work, and more importantly, less annoying work.

    Second, I empowered Sarah. She was able to get more work done, more quickly and felt more capable in her position. Her boss was happier with her, and I felt great.

    Lastly, because she controlled supplies, I was able to get floppy disks and other small things easily when I called her. My boss couldn’t because she was annoyed with the way he and others had treated her.

    The Investment

    This was an investment for both of us. We both invested time, giving up our lunch hours. I think this was a week or two, but not longer.  I also invested a bit of money, perhaps $5-6 a day back then, to provide lunch. Not nothing, but not a lot.

    However, the investment payed off. I kept a note of this and reminded my boss at my review. I got a raise that year, not solely on this, but since I was competing with others for money, this was something that helped me stand out.

    This also got me a good review from Sarah’s boss, which the overall manager of the station heard. That opened up opportunities for me as a developer position in the corporate headquarters opened up and I got recommendations from all three managers.

    Look for Opportunities

    These days many of us work remotely part of the time. We may not see our coworkers, and perhaps lunch isn’t easy, but we could invest time to solve something or train someone. Either online, written, or in person. A little investment to make your job (or others’) easier can pay off for the company.

    It can also pay off for your personally if you document this and bring it up with your boss. It’s also a great story for interviews.

    This is extra work. This is unpaid work. However, many people in many fields invest in their learning and advancement. From mechanics to doctors, people give up some of their time to grow their careers. You can do this as well.