Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • T-SQL Tuesday #163 – The Best Career Advice

    We’re a little delayed this month. Both the host and I forgot about this. So far in June, I’ve been in Fort Lauderdale, Las Vegas, Denver, and Cambridge for events. I head back to Orlando this week, and I’m a little out of sorts.

    Maybe one piece of career advice: try to avoid spending 14 of the first 20 days of June away from home.

    We have Gethyn Ellis hosting this month with a great invitation: what’s the best career advice you’ve gotten. I really have two answers, but I have to choose the best one, so I’ll do that.

    Say No First

    I was actually at the Redgate LevelUp 2023 Conference this week and two different speakers mentioned that they keep saying yes to requests. They told the audience that they struggled to say “no”. (a 2019 recap of the event here)

    I don’t know when I learned this, but at some point in my 30+ year career I started to say “No” as a default. I would just say no to requests from co-workers, customer, even my manager. I just wouldn’t initially commit to many things, at least not many things that can’t be finished in a few hours.

    I didn’t say no to everything, but the busier I was, the more I said no. Then I’d let them convince me why it was a good idea, and sometimes I’d change my mind, and sometimes not. However, this helped me in a few ways.

    First, I learned to better manage my workload. I hate not meeting a commitment, and I always try to under-promise and over-deliver. By saying no, I give myself time to think about whether I can sustain something.

    Second, this started to force others to really justify their requests. I’ve had no shortage of things people ask for that are really their dreams and ideas, often not thought through. Many people have learned to ask for something without really thinking about it. Just like many technical people start writing code and compiling it without really thinking through what is needed. By not agreeing right away and letting them make a case for why something is needed, I force them to really justify if something is needed.

    I get some pushback from managers, but learning to stand up and argue a bit is a good skill. Overall, I’ve frustrated some people, but most others learn that they can count on me.

    If I commit.

  • Highly Skilled

    The world of work has been changing quite a bit over the last few years. The pandemic appeared to be a boon to technology workers, both by allowing us to work remotely, but also taking advantage of our skills to deploy more technology throughout the world. At the same time, late 2022 and 2023 have seen many companies pull back and cut their staff, including technical staff. It seems that in mid-2023, we have both a demand for technology workers and a lot of people looking for technology jobs.

    A recent 2022 report on working in technology has some interesting insights. It is summarized at ZDNet, but you can see the original report here. The highlights from the report are that quite a few top performers left their jobs, recruitment doesn’t work well, and finding top talent is hard. These aren’t that surprising to many of us that actually write code or manage systems, but it is nice to see that founders and executives are reporting this (they were the ones surveyed in the report).

    For much of my career, I do think many executives have taken advantage of tech workers, pressing them to get more and more done with fewer resources. Even though many people were paid well (though not all), they may not have enjoyed their jobs. I’ve had a lot of great positions, but over the years, I’ve met a surprising number of people who wouldn’t recommend others follow them into their career choice.

    The pandemic made it easier for people to switch jobs since everyone was remote. That might not have benefitted lots of people, but it certainly helped top talent. If you’re one of those people, you likely got a better job, with better compensation, and hopefully, more interesting work to you.

    For others, we might still be looking for something new (or worried about the security of our current position). One of the main parts of the report talks about the problems with the traditional recruitment model. First, it takes too long, an average of 4 months to fill technical roles. There is pressure to speed that up, while also understanding that candidates will need some training and re-skilling or up-skilling to meet an organization’s particular needs. That would seem to be good for many candidates, but I think this report is biased to startups and newer organizations, not mature ones.

    I do think the impressions you make early are important. A candidate needs to ensure that they have technical skills. You should be able to solve problems but also think on your feet. Respond to the interviewer and showcase critical thinking. A developer should be able to answer general questions, like how to find duplicates in a table or sort data that is aggregated. You don’t need to solve all of Itzik’s query problems, but you ought to know some of them. I’d expect you to know the basics of this job. If you’re unsure, post a note on the forums and ask people what things they need to know to do their jobs.

    However, apart from the technical skills, you need good soft skills. A strong candidate will communicate well, display confidence, relate to the interview(ers), and build some rapport. They will look to ask questions that seek more information about what is asked, but without being confrontational or disagreeable. There’s a skill to debating a point rather than arguing with someone. The ability to get along with others and find synergy is important. When others think adding you to the team makes the entire team better, you stand a good chance of getting an offer.

    If you’re unsure of whether you present a good impression, get a few friends or co-workers to interview you and give you honest feedback. Maybe even ask a friend who hires people to mock interview for a position. Learning to present a better impression will go a long way toward increasing your chances of getting hired. Especially if firms are trying to make quicker decisions.

    Maybe the big change from the report is 80% of people surveyed say they are willing hire someone without a college degree. Whether they actually would to that, whether their HR or other policies allow this, and whether they convince existing employees to do this remains to be seen. However, many of us know that a college degree isn’t a good predictor of whether someone can do any job well. I hope future hiring trends confirm that.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Blogging for the Tech Professional at Denver Dev Days

    For those that attended my talk at Denver Dev Days, here are the slides: BloggingFortheTechPro.pptx

    A couple interesting questions that I need to add to the deck.

    What do you recommend for a student? (or someone early in their career)

    This could also apply to someone changing careers or fields. If you don’t have experience, does blogging help?

    It does. A blog is your portfolio and it’s a good way to showcase what you are learning, have learned, what you are interested in. This gives you some way to show “experience” even if you don’t have any.

    Build a project, explain how you learned something, document your journey. I might think about a wider set of topics rather than deeper on one here, as it’s hard to know what you want to do early in your journey. It’s also a time when you don’t want to limit opportunities, so showcase a lot of different things you’ve worked on.

    How do I get better at blogging?

    Build a network of people you trust. Let them see drafts, get feedback, and incorporate the feedback into your writing. I would do that in two different ways:

    1. Am I correct in my technical details? To do this, get quality feedback from a subject matter expert. Think senior skilled person evaluating your work here.
    2. Am I explaining things well? Get feedback from anyone on spelling, phrasing, grammar, and flow. Think English teacher feedback here.

    How do I justify the time to blog when I’m busy at work?

    This is an investment in your career. Doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc. need to work on their careers outside of work. Chefs, mechanics, plumbers do this as well.

    Technical people can do this. Take 15-30 minutes a week to do this. Over time, it’s a great way to add richness to your resume and stand out from others.

    Do you blog at work?

    In general, I make notes and sketches of things at work. 3-5 sentences, some bullet points. Then I would spend time outside of work fleshing out my posts. For examples of how long I spend on things, check out the SQL New Blogger series. If you’re starting out, double my times for yourself.

  • What’s Your Job?

    There are a lot of technology people looking for jobs these days, especially after all the layoffs that have occurred in 2023. At the same time, I have a number of friends and clients that are struggling to hire qualified people. They get lots of candidates, but they are dismayed at how little the candidates they interview seem to know, or at least how little candidates know in the areas that their organization has needs.

    Today, I want to help people get better at growing and managing their careers. Therefore I’m asking those of you that are employed to describe your job. Give us your title in the comments and then list 5-10 things that you’ve done lately. What types of queries have you written? What tasks did you complete with SQL Server or Azure SQL? Have you needed to research something to solve a problem? What knowledge or concepts helped you complete a task?

    The idea is to share some of the skills or concepts a person should have to grow their career. Hopefully, some people will then read descriptions and build skills from this list. They’ll try to accomplish the tasks you’ve had to finish, hopefully documenting or blogging about their work.

    As an example, I’ll give a few tech things I’ve seen lately from clients. These are practical things someone needed to finish, or something they asked someone else to do.

    I was working with a client and there was a need to find all the logins whose passwords were not set to expire. How can you do that?

    Another had a table had a lot of duplicate data, and all duplicates but the row with the latest date needed to be deleted. What does the DELETE statement look like? Caveat, what if I need to update all but the first row (newest) with a new value in some column to mark them as inactive?

    A client needed to get a list of all the servers from their central management server (CMS) and then extract that list as a CSV file. They were using this for some audit purposes.

    At another client, a developer needed to clone a git repository and then open the .sql files in Azure Data Studio. Can you show how to do this?

    A DBA wanted to decide whether you choose a clustered or non-clustered index for a table that contains sales information and is often queried for a few rows based on a date. Why would one index be better than the other?

    Don’t answer these questions, as this is homework for others. However, if you could share a list of things you would expect your new coworker to know or solve, that will help us raise the bar for what we expect from our colleagues.

    Steve Jones

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