Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Dropping Career Goals for Q2

    I set goals at the beginning of 2023 for Q1. I didn’t do well, as my evaluation earlier this week has a D for my efforts.

    I’m re-evaluating things, and for now, I’ve decided not to set more goals for the time being.

    Why?

    One of the things I end my career presentations with is this: we work to live, not live to work. Find balance in your life, between your career and life.

    I truly believe that, and as I re-evaluated myself last week, I realized that I am out of balance. There have been some stressful things in life that have been hard on me, but more than the actual thing, it’s had an impact on my mental health. I’ve been a bit drained, so I haven’t wanted to take time to focus, preferring to relax a bit more with my wife, guitar, or a good book.

    I started to recognize this when I did my Feb update, but thought I could push through. I didn’t, or couldn’t, and while I appreciate the optimism, I realize that I don’t want to ignore the additional stress in my life.

    A Deliberate Pause

    I don’t want to let goals go, but I am going to ignore them for Q2 and focus on being kind to myself and recognizing I need balance here. I’ll revisit this in late June and see how I am doing then.

  • Goal Progress for March 2023

    The grade for March is also D. Details below, but just not making a lot of progress in these areas. In fact, I find myself not motivated to work on goals very much. That’s a bit sad, but it’s also where I am in life.

    So far I have for 2023:

    • Jan – D
    • Feb – D
    • Mar – D

    I set goals at the beginning of the year, and I’m tracking my progress in these updates during 2022.

    Reviewing Goals

    The last month has been hectic. Both life outside of work and work have had me tackling lots of little tasks, which is distracting and reduces my energy for focused work. As a result, I haven’t been doing much on these goals.

    I think I’m slightly overloaded, and worried about burnout, so I’m going to ignore goals for Q2.

    Reading

    Two books on the list: marketing and coaching. I haven’t picked a marketing book, but I picked Wolfpack for coaching. With one started and one not, this is an F.

    Progress:

    Career

    My goals:

    • Set up a tracking system based on the book for my efforts with customers
    • Track and calculate my scores to help me better approach how I work with customers.
    • Review this with my boss and with someone in sales

    Rating: B

    I have been tracking my interactions with customers here. There haven’t been a lot, but it is interesting to stop and think about how this is going. I have chatted with my boss and gotten a little feedback.

    Community

    Here are the goals I set.

    • 2 speaking engagements for community (RMOUG Training Days complete. SQL Bits complete)
    • Reach out to 10 SQL Sat groups that did not run an event in 2022 and motivate them for 2023. This should be at least 2 emails to each person/group.
    • Reach out to all 2022 organizers and ask about plans for 2023
    • Start coding a tool for converting schedules to HTML.
    • Hold office hours once in Q1
    • Send 3 monthly SQL Saturday updates to the community

    Rating: D

    I did complete another community (unpaid) speaking engagement. I’ve reached out to a few SQL Saturday groups and we have a few more events on the schedule, but I haven’t had a lot of energy to do this and the limited responses are discouraging.

    Yes, I get discouraged.

    Haven’t started a tool, didn’t hold office hours, two updates sent.

    Personal

    My goals:

    • Use my Power BI report for stats
    • Update the Power BI report based on feedback from athletes
    • Build 6 wooden coasters – I haven’t made enough time for my hobby here, so I’m going to start small. We need more coasters (as noticed over the holidays), so I want to build 6. Same style, different.

    Rating: D

    I haven’t updated the Power BI report. In fact, I found a couple errors in calculations since DAX is a weakness of mine. As a result, I pulled down some pages. I also think my data model is slightly broken and needs work. No time spent on here.

    It’s been cold, and when it isn’t, I’ve had other things to tackle, so no time on wood projects for me. I feel bad about this, but I also know I have too many hobbies. With my Duolingo language stuff, guitar, and then coaching, not a lot of time to spend here.

  • Building a Better Profile

    I give talks on branding and managing your career at various events. Often I am helping people to better market and sell themselves if find new opportunities. One area that I talk about for data professionals is the online profile. I think having one is important, especially as many of our contacts with potential employers are made digitally.

    I ran across an article that focuses on LinkedIn, specifically the profile you create there. It has some thoughts on recommendations, accomplishments, certifications, and more. I like the thoughts, and I do think they help showcase who you are as a professional working in some field. It is worth reading through the article and adjusting your profile to include these items.

    I’d guess that most people don’t have these things to add. They might have friends who will write a recommendation, but what about classes, certifications, projects, etc? Getting those is real work, and it’s an investment of time and effort to grow your abilities.

    Having a full (or fuller) profile helps you stand out. It helps give hiring managers confidence that you are a person who can do the job they need. Getting this full profile, however, is something you need to do over time. Invest in your skills and showcase this in your profile.

    One easy way to do this is to take the work you do and document it. Write blogs, share posts, create an ongoing commentary of what you do at work. When you feel proud of something you’ve done, find a way to add it to your profile. This will create the impression that you are getting things done and solving problems at work.

    I’m sure all of you do this. Take a little time and ensure the next person that might consider hiring you, or the person you want to hire you, knows this as well. It can be easy to talk about these things in an interview, but you need to get the interview first. Your resume/CV and profile are how you get the interview, so be sure you are taking care of them across time.

    Steve Jones

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

  • T-SQL Tuesday #159– Resolutions

    tsqltuesdayI missed T-SQL Tuesday last month. I got busy and distracted with some travel. For #159, Deepthi Goguri hosted. I’ve enjoyed watching her blog and grow her knowledge the last few years and I was honored to meet her in person at the 2022 Summit. Hopefully the first of more meetings.

    She had two choices: SQL Server 2022 new features or New resolutions. Both are tempting. I’m actually in a SQL Server 2022 class with Bob Ward as I start this post, taking a break from overload.

    Hmmm, what do I write about?

    Note: You can always fill in your blog later with T-SQL Tuesday topics. Just pick one and link to it. That’s what I’m doing here.

    A Neat SQL Server 2022 Feature

    I’ve sometimes been excited by new features in SQL Server, sometimes not. In this case, one of the interesting things I learned from Bob Ward was on the new contained AGs in SQL Server 2022. This is a neat implementation that essentially creates a new master and msdb database for the AG that contains the server level objects needed by the AG databases. This gets logins, jobs, etc. into these extra dbs.

    There might be some holes in here, but being able to have these objects automatically synched is huge. The downside is you need to add these objects while connecting to the AG databases, so I can see some admins making mistakes and connecting to the instance rather than the AG, but I’m also hoping some automation, some scripting, etc. is used to ensure this works smoothly in your environment.