Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Goal Progress for Nov 2022

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

    Another month of busy stuff. A long trip for the Data Community Summit and then gone the last few days of the month. Gone from home for 12 days, so more than Oct.

    The conference was stressful and busy. It ate up a lot of time, with a lot of home time consumed with prep and stress. I have to get things scheduled and ready when I travel, so 10 days in the Pacific NW mean I need 12 days of stuff ready. Same for my Dec trip. I’m in the EU for 2 weeks, so a lot of prep.

    However, I made some progress in a few areas. I read a bit more, getting through some books. I also finished my coaching certification and spent a bunch of time on my Power BI Reports.

    I’m going to abandon the Habitat goal for this year. My health hasn’t been outstanding, and while I can try to fit one in, I’m unlikely to do well since I have been struggling a bit with my ankle. I’ll aim for 2023.

    Grade: B

    Here are the goals:

    Work

    Personal

    I managed to get my Power BI report hooked to Google Sheets. I also copied it over for 2023.

    • Link Google Sheets to Power BI – 100%
      – figured it out

    • Create Report – 90%  – I have a report working for all my metrics.
      A few tweaks needed

    • Create Dashboard – 90%  – Needs tweaking, but it’s there.
    • Get people using it – 10% – Got one asst coach looking at it.
    • Coaching certification – 100% – some downtime this month helped

    Community

    • Support the Colorado groups by speaking twice and helping get one event set up
      – 66%
      • CO Springs event set up and executed
      • Denver SQL Server SQL Saturday executed
    • Speak at 3 other community events (was user groups) outside of Colorado – 100%
      • DBA Fundamentals group
      • Toronto SSUG
      • SQL Saturdays in Jacksonville, New Jersey, LA, Denver, Boston, Toronto,  Oregon
    • Support SQL Saturdays – Help get 10 events run in 2022
      – 100%
      • We have had 15 run this year and 3 more scheduled
    • Volunteer 4 days with Habitat – 0 days
      • Not happy about this still. I had hoped to go Sept 15, but they cancelled the build that day. Need to find another day, but it’s hard. They aren’t doing every Wed/Thur/fri, and travel is getting in the way.

  • Investing in Another’s Career

    Years ago my son asked me to buy him a copy of The Unincorporated Man. It’s a science fiction book about the future, economics, and sentient AI systems. It’s the first part of a series of four, and I’ve enjoyed reading them all. I highly recommend them if you like science fiction.

    In any case, I was reminded of the series when I saw this article from the New Yorker about selling shares in yourself. It’s part of the premise behind the Unincorporated Man, where every person is their own corporation and sells shares of themselves to finance their careers. You could sell shares in your future earnings to finance education or some other investment in your future. In return, you have to pay back that value through dividends.

    I don’t know if this is a good idea, and it goes a bit sideways in the books as your “shareholders” can hold sway over which jobs you take and when. They do this to maximize their return on investment, putting their interests over your desires.

    While selling yourself in your early education or career is one thing, what about doing after you have had some success? The article linked above talks about this, where some entrepreneurs who have had some success decided to put all their assets and debts into a kind of fund and sell that on the stock market. They are doing this as individuals, not as a company. Essentially, you invest in their careers and their potential.

    They, and others, want to bring this to others, essentially bringing venture capital to people who are early in their careers. This allows others to speculate and invest in artists, athletes, and other professionals. This might allow people who aren’t rich to absorb the risk of pursuing their career goals.

    It’s an interesting idea, but I do worry about the influence investors might have over their investments. It’s one thing to invest in a hands-off manner and hope things improve. It’s quite another to attempt to manage the investment because of the number of shares you hold. Plenty of companies have learned that investors are not always willing to trust in existing management. What happens when that management is you?

    I loved the book, but I don’t think I’d want to follow this model. Instead, I like the Kickstarter and Indiegogo models where someone can produce a product or work of art, and others can choose to invest or not for that one project. To me, that’s a better way of allowing investors to support those that want to change their lives through by pursuing their craft.  Pursue some endeavor, selling shares to fund your efforts with future dividends or perhaps access to the end result.

    Steve Jones

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

  • The Importance of New Speakers–#NewStarNovember

    Many of us have learned how to research and get new information online. I certainly think the written word, whether from formal articles at places like SQL Server Central or from an individual’s blog, is very important to many of us looking to learn and grow. Or just solve problems at work. Sometimes we just need a little help understanding things.

    Many of us read a lot, but there is something special when we get together in groups at an event like a SQL Saturday or larger conference. There is energy and excitement, inspiration, and engagement that is hard to replicate online or in the written word. Especially during these times when the COVID-19 pandemic separated many of us from regular gatherings with others.

    We’ve had an amazing community, but lots of us are getting older. The people who taught me SQL Server, and many of whom have run user groups and organized SQL Saturdays will move on in their lives or retire. I’ve already seen plenty of people lose their energy or get busy with other parts of their lives during the pandemic.

    While we’ve had no shortage of speakers, I think we need to grow more for the future. I also want to get a more diverse group of speakers, not because we need more women or other minorities for some political purpose. I want more diversity of speakers because people with different experience and different frames of reference approach problems differently.

    I hope that many more of you consider giving a talk. I hope that some of those that do will love it and continue to do it more in the future. I’m also hoping we do see more SQL Saturday events come back in the future as these are a great way to encourage and support new speakers.

    Part of a Series of #NewStarNovember posts. If you want to help promote new speakers, consider writing a post as well. Some ideas at the New Stars of Data.

  • Losing Skills Because of Automation

    When I was younger, it seemed that everyone I worked with in technology knew how to build a computer. Most knew how to work with a BIOS, were comfortable with command lines, and could assemble complex compiler directives into a Make file. Over time, it seems many people, especially Windows and MacOS users, became focused on the things they needed for their job, lacking a lot of knowledge about how computers process instructions and the low-level operations they perform.

    There are plenty of very talented developers out there, and many great data modelers, but as I work with many of them that try to make the transition to DevOps, I see lots of uncertainty and tentative behavior. They often approach builds, automated tests, and deployments as though these are completely new skills they need to learn. New software that is foreign to them.

    I wonder if the increased use of automation will make this worse in the future? Already plenty of companies are looking to low-code and no-code solutions as a way to handle the lack of staff to perform development. Will that be exacerbated in the future as more and more automation is put in place that mocks up a shell (or more) of a project and handles work for the developers and even operations staff? Will they struggle to debug complex problems, which are the more likely problems to occur in modern software?

    There is an interesting article about surgeons that might be losing some skills with the advent of robots helping in surgery. While there are some worrisome aspects to this for me, as someone getting older and possibly needing medical care, I find that some of this is applicable to the world of software. How well do we apprentice people new to our environment and give them the chance to build new skills? Often we have senior people taking on interesting work, making data modeling decisions, troubleshooting issues and more. Do we allow more junior people the chance to get hands-on experience and perhaps take charge to lead others? To learn to actually be the one to make the decision?

    In a few places, I’ve seen senior people fixing bugs and junior people developing code. That seemed strange at first, until I realized that fixing problems is more than likely something I want the better developer dealing with, not the worse one. These don’t even have to be issues in production. In a DevOps world, I might have the senior people looking at and fixing the bugs that are caught in CI. While I appreciate giving someone the chance to correct their mistakes, I also think that a “refactoring” or improving of code might be something senior people are better positioned to tackle.

    Of course, I think rotating people in and out of roles, giving them a chance to experience difference sides of our industry, is a good idea. This might include learning how dev works (for Ops people) and how Ops works (for developers) can bring about empathy, understanding, some skills, but likely to create a better culture of collaboration. A tenet of DevOps.

    What skills are we worried about learning? Or losing? To what extent ought we try to ensure others grow wide and deeper outside of their core skills? I find this to be a area that the best DevOps companies do well. They have champions that can provide assistance, knowledge, and teaching, not just do the work. Companies that pretend to adopt DevOps aim for specialization, letting others do the work when they can. Over time, I think they’ll end up like some of today’s surgeons: only practicing their craft for the first time (with no training) when someone else isn’t available.

    Steve Jones

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