Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Goal Progress for Jan 2023

    The grade for January is a D. Details below, but just not making a lot of progress in these areas.

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

    Reviewing Goals

    The various sections are listed below, and I’m giving a SMART grade based on what I listed. Have I gotten much done. January wasn’t too busy for me at work, but a little busy outside of work with coaching ramping up and my wife being down from work for a few weeks.

    I got a bit done, but not a lot.

    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.

    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: D, I rated myself, but no review with others. On me for not getting this scheduled in a timely manner.

    Community

    • 2 speaking engagements for community (RMOUG Training Days and SQL Bits are on my schedule)
    • 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

    This is a lot. It’s a lot for Q1, especially the emails, as I don’t want to overload any one individual. Two can be challenging. I set up a repo, I did reach out to 9 organizers from 2022, so that’s half. We also have 4 new events on the schedule and 6 previous ones. Given this is only 1/3 of the quarter, I think I’m on a C pace.

    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.

    The first two are done, but it’s been in the 20s and 30s in Denver, so not a lot of enthusiasm for woodwork. Maybe a C here as I have updated the report and gotten feedback. No coasters though.

  • Speakers Are Normal People

    The #SQLFamily is amazing, at least I think it is. Like many families, it’s welcoming, supportive, and comforting. It’s also maddening, frustrating, and exacerbating at times. Like most families, or at least the ones I know, it’s not perfect, but it’s what we have and at the end of the day, most of us get along with each other.

    It’s also an open group of people. In general, we welcome people with open arms and smiles. Those of us that are more visible or prominent are willing to listen to, help, and support anyone. I was overjoyed during the recent PASS Data Community Summit, where I had the chance to see so many people that I haven’t seen in person in 2-3 years. I met many other interesting people for the first time and enjoyed the experience.

    Not everyone feels the same way. I loved seeing Kimberly Tripp and Paul Randal for the first time in years and was honored to share the stage with them for the Community Keynote. I enjoyed the time we spent together, but afterwards Paul wrote about some people not feeling included or welcome.

    I understand that feeling. In many ways, much of adult life can mimic teenage years in high school with cliques and pettiness. I won’t pretend that doesn’t happen in the #SQLFamily, but I find it quite minimized, especially compared with many other communities of which I’ve been a part in the past. I haven’t seen the higher profile speakers and leaders in the SQL Community dismiss someone for asking a question or expressing an opinion. I have, however, seen that in other communities.

    It can be intimidating to walk up to someone that you don’t know who you might feel is famous or well known. It can be intimidating to just walk up to a group of people who are talking when they appear to know each other. I have that feeling at times even today, so I appreciate feeling like an outsider. In the Summit keynote, I talked about the thrill in meeting Kalen Delaney in 1999 and shaking her hand. I was nervous and intimidated to ask her a question after her presentation. At the time I hadn’t delivered a talk in front of anyone outside of school environments and was a fairly introverted geek. It was hard to step up and make that effort, but I’m glad I did.

    As Paul writes, anyone is welcome in the #SQLFamily. Anyone can join. You don’t have to come shake a hand or say hi, but I’m happy when you do. Will we be best friends right away? Probably not. Will we go out to dinner that night? Maybe. I’ve certainly met attendees at events and then had dinner with them. I know plenty of other speakers who have as well.

    Many of the people who speak, organize, and write/blog/tweet/etc. in our industry are friends. We do value time with each other, and that can feel like a club, but it’s not. We enjoy seeing each other and want to catch up, like any group of friends. However, we are also welcoming of newcomers, so feel free to introduce yourself.

    Ultimately those of us who engage in these highly visible, extroverted acts are often just like the rest of you. We’re a mix of people that are mostly introverted, with a few extroverts thrown in. Some speakers are very smart and talented, some are more like me: we know enough to get the things done that we’re asked to do.  Some of us love to go out and sing karaoke until all hours of the night and others prefer a small dinner or a little tabletop gaming in a quiet environment.

    My encouragement to get people to meet others, network, set up events or meetups, and more isn’t to try and convince any of you to join the cool kids club. It’s not to get you to change who you are.

    It’s to help you find your tribe. To find your kind of people.

    I’d love to greet all of you with a hug at events, call you by name, and go out to dinner with you. I can’t because there isn’t enough time in the day. And quite frankly, I really, really value my alone time. What I want more than anything is for you to be successful, find a great job or career you relish, and for you to enjoy spending time with those you enjoy. Whoever and wherever that is. That takes some effort, but it’s worth the energy involved.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Knowing Your Technologies

    A while back I ran across a blog post that talks about the difference between database snapshots and database backups. There are certainly some similarities and some differences, as well as an overlap in the places where you might choose to use each of these technologies. Both might be useful as a way to recover from a bad code deployment, but both aren’t necessarily helpful for a DR situation where the primary server has a catastrophic hardware failure.

    It’s often the case that we learn only a bit about some of the technologies in SQL Server. That’s understandable as the platform has grown very complex, encompassing a vast array of technologies and options. There is often some overlap between them and possibly different places where you might choose to use one or the other to solve a problem.

    In plenty of cases, one technology will stand out, especially when you have gathered enough requirements to understand the entire situation. More information can help you narrow down your choices, and even make a decision, if you know both (or all) the technologies well.

    If.

    The key here is that as you look for solutions, you should be sure that you understand the technologies well. Dive deep into each of your choices and make an effort to determine the positives and negatives, the advantages of one over the other, as well as the limitations or holes that may be present. You can work often work around limitations, but you should be aware of what they are.

    We can’t learn everything today, or even everything that we need to know in a short period of time. However, when we are faced with a situation that has multiple solutions and unfamiliar technologies, we should ensure that we try to learn, ask questions, and do our best to understand the boundaries of the question and the technologies that might solve our problem.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Goals for 2023

    This is the goal setting post for 2023. The previous ones were:

    As with previous years, I’ll break these into three categories: career, personal, and community. There’s some blend with all of these, but these are goals that I want to use to engage and grow my life in interesting ways. To aim for mastery, autonomy, and purpose, as Daniel Pink wrote in Drive.

    The idea here is to set goals for Q1 2023 and review in March. I’ll also do monthly reviews of these. The rest of this post should be repeated in all future posts.

    Reading

    I’m separating this out, as I’ll put a few things in here that span other areas.

    For Q1, I’m aiming for 2 books outside of the fiction I enjoy. These are going to be in these areas:

    • marketing – title TBD. Something to help me better understand how to approach this part of my job. There have been recommendations in our Slack channels, so I’ll pick one.
    • Coaching – Again, a few recommendations in groups I frequent.This is important as I influence young people.

    Both of these are items I’ll target for these reasons:

    • S – This is targeted, reading a book
    • M – I’ll finish or not
      • A- both
      • B – 1 done, 1 partial
      • C – 1 done
      • D – partial
      • F – not started
    • A – I read around 100 books a year, so 2 in a quarter isn’t too much.
    • R – Marketing is a part of my job and career at this point, so this is good. Coaching is something I do personally with kids and with customers for DevOps.
    • T – I have 3 months, until 31 Mar.

    Career

    My career has taken a strange turn in that I continue to do some technical work and consulting with clients and customers, but more of my effort is spent understanding marketing and sales. I pivoted slightly last year by reading The Trusted Sales Advisor,

    I also need to do more work with other platforms, at least to become more comfortable with them. I thought I might do more in 2022, but ended up getting buried with community stuff.

    For Q1, I’m doing to aim to do a couple things:

    • 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

    This is not a lot, but it’s a good start. I can review this goal as:

    • S – This will include a way to track things, likely Excel, and then some formulas or reporting to help me see how I’m doing. I also need to fill this out after each call with a customer. I’ll send it to a couple people in sales for review in March from two people. setting a reminder now.
    • M – I will have a sheet to look at, and a record of calls. I also have a review reminder set.
      • A – All calls tracked, review complete, data used to change my work.
      • B – most calls tracked, review complete,
      • C – half calls tracked, only 1/2 reviews,
      • D – less than half calls tracked, no review,
      • F – no sheet set up
    • A – Building a simple tracking sheet ought to be easy. The formulas are given. We used to track calls, now I’m adding in 5 minutes to think about how things went. Getting people to meet with me should be achievable if I make the time.
    • R – Important for my job
    • T – I have a 31 Mar deadline.

    Community

    A portion of my job is community. It’s also a passion. I spend time here outside of work, I volunteer and go to UGs/events when I don’t have to, and I certainly do work with SQL Saturday outside of my job. In fact, I was fixing PRs and updating the site while on vacation in Portugal, mildly anoying my wife.

    In terms of a goal here, I’m going to focus most on SQL Saturday and less on speaking for now. I likely will go to a few events, but I want to limit my efforts in Q1.

    The goals here will be the following:

    • 2 speaking engagements for community (SQL Sat Austin and SQL Bits are on my schedule)
    • 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

    In terms of the review, I see them this way.

    • S – These are fairly specific. I can track emails. I can’t quite track motivation, but that’s something I need to do to help grow SQL Saturday back to where it was. I also can start putting code in a repo, which is a big step.
    • M – For the review, I’ll say this:
      • A – 2 presentations complete, 10 emails to new organizers, 36 to older ones, at least 3 commits and a MVP of a tool, office hours, 3 updates
      • B – 2 presentations complete, 8 emails to new organizers, 30 to old, 2 commits, office hours, 2 updates
      • C – 2 presentations complete, 5-8 emails to new, 20 to old, 1 commit, office hours, 2 updates
      • D – 1 presentation,  3 emails to new, 10 to old, no commits, no office hours, 1 update
      • F – lower than D
    • A – This can be tough. Finding time for SQL Saturday comes a1nd goes, as does motivation. I should easily do the talks, and I can easily reach the emails by making time. Office Hours can be tough, and the monthly newsletter is something I’ve struggled with.
    • R – These are community efforts that should help others. They don’t directly help me, other than building some skills as a leader, but they will help others if I can get more events moving.
    • T – All bound by the 31 Mar deadline.

    Personal

    My personal goals are going to be a little shortchanged here. When I look at what’s above, that’s more than I probably should tackle, though some of them should be quick to get through with a short bit of time every week.

    Coaching also ramps up, so I’m going to limit this to a couple things for Q1.

    • 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.

    These can be rated as follows:

    • S – Use means I gather stats. Updates are from feedback. Coasters are specific.
    • M – Have I entered stats on the sheet, did I respond to feedback, coasters.
      • A – All stats entered in sheet/report. Take all feedback and do something, 6 coasters
      • B – all stats entered, some feedback, 4 coasters
      • C – All stats entered, feedback not influencing report, 2 coasters
      • D – some stats entered, no feedback used, no coasters
      • F – failing at stats
    • A – These should be achievable. The coasters should be 2 short periods
    • R – The first two are relevant to my efforts coaching. The last is just for satisfaction and to remind me of hobbies.
    • T – 31 Mar.