Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Half of All Engineers

    The AI LLM boom seems to show no sign of slowing down. Each time I think we’ve reached some level of crazy use or predictions, things take another turn. I still find myself pinging back and forth between this will be amazingly good and horrifyingly bad.

    Sometimes on the same day.

    Today, I’m a little more down on AI. I was listening to Steve Yegge on the Pragmatic Engineer podcast, and they were discussing the curve of AI usage at companies. He points out that he’s mad that Amazon let 16,000 engineers go and might let more go. He worries that companies might let 50% of their engineers go. Not necessarily because the top 50% will be more productive with AI than 100% of engineers without it. Rather the concern is that companies will get rid of half their salaries to pay for the AI tokens for the other half.

    Steve Yegge is an accomplished software engineer that has worked at Amazon and Google. Steve wrote Gastown and has been someone who not only is successful at producing code but also thinks a lot about how we produce more software.

    How coordinated and powerful are the new models? Can they really do a lot of software work that we do today? Steve thinks so, but to be fair, he’s got a lot of experience and can architect and design software well, which means he can also guide AI LLMs and agents to write more code. He also thinks the latest models, like Opus 4.6, are way more capable that most people believe.

    I also caught this post on X about a paper predicting that AI might cause economic collapse as less knowledge workers are used in various tasks. This might happen faster than we can absorb those workers who are laid off in the name of AI back into the economy in other positions. It’s a scary thought.

    The positive side of this, at least from me, is that so many organizations move slower, and so many people aren’t extremely competent software engineers, so we’ll get a lot of bad software written by non-technical people that doesn’t scale. We’ll have more database (and application) performance issues, and that will slow the use of YOLO, vibe coding.

    Plus plenty of companies just aren’t implementing or looking to pay for lots of tokens. They’ll just move slower and the world will change, but not anywhere near the pace that Steve or others think it will. We’ll see, but let me know what you think.

    For a more positive spin, I’ve been reading Reshuffle, which is a little less depressing about the future.

    Steve Jones

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

    Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.

  • Acting with Confidence

    Recently, I saw a graph about making decisions that showed the impact of both reversibility and consequences. Here is an example of such a graph and how one might approach decisions. If things are easily reversible or have a low consequence, we tend to make a decision and move on. Or we are willing to make a decision. One of the examples of such a decision was choosing what to wear out to dinner. It’s easy to change, and (in general) of little consequence. Choosing to send a large amount of money to someone through Venmo (or some other mechanism), can be hard to reverse and have substantial consequences.

    This made me think of some of the DBA and developer decisions I’ve made in the past. When we work with databases, the changes we make can have a large impact and be quite consequential to our organization. Downtime, data quality, etc. could all impact revenue, profit, reputation, or even future prospects of survival. That can be a lot of pressure when you are deciding to refactor a data model or adjust a lot of data during a deployment.

    We might think we can rollback or undo changes, but often we would end up applying reversing transactions. If I change a data type, the data is changed ( assuming the DML completes). To change back, I can’t roll back outside of a restore. I would change the type back and have an equally large and long transaction run. Having HA or replication technologies in the mix can dramatically impact the scope of both the initial and reversing transactions.

    How confident must you be in your actions before you undertake something of consequence? Do you require an easy rollback, or are you willing to act even if the rollback is painful?

    Maybe a better question is how do you appraise the consequence of an action? Is it the application/database or perhaps the data? You might consider all the dependencies from other applications or pipelines on this. I know many DBAs worry about the performance impact of changes that can slow or stop other work. I constantly see people asking if Flyway can estimate how long a change will take, especially when dev/test environments are a poor representation of production sizes, scales, and workloads.

    If you have a 2GB database, you might just make changes. A restore is quick, and I’ve often found greenfield applications taking this approach since the data sizes are small and even consequential actions can be undone with a restore operation. Many of the “code-first” technologies work great in these situations, but once we have multiple application dependencies and large data sets, restores can be non-trivial or even unacceptable ways to deal with issues.

    The image linked above talks about gathering data and analyzing, which sounds like the prudent thing to do, but this can be easier to say than do in practice. Deciding what analysis to undertake and how long to spend on it are the real tricks. Those are the judgment calls that only experienced humans can make. While AI might help, this is an area I really want capable humans with the final say.

    Steve Jones

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

    Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.

  • Finding Balance: Things Will Come Up

    I have a presentation on finding balance in your career that got quite a few people thinking and commenting on their own experiences. I decided to write a few posts supporting the ideas in the presentation, which my wife and I have used to both drive our careers forward while enjoying our lives.

    Just this week, I had an example.

    This is a series of posts on finding balance in your career.

    It Starts with a Picture

    My daughter told me this happened Monday afternoon. This is one of our horse feeders, and as you can see, the bottom has fallen out.

    2026-03_0141

    This happens periodically, but it was unexpected. In this case, I’d returned from a week and a half of travel, and I needed to try and get prepped for some additional travel the following week.

    In other words, I had plenty of work to do, lots of commitments in life already in place, and now something new pops into my life.

    This isn’t critical, but it is something I need to get done before I leave again, which left me limited time around work, coaching commitments a few nights a week, trying to get time to exercise to maintain my health, cooking for the family while I’m here, and, of course, getting time to relax.

    I decided I’d have to find time in a couple ways. First, I got up a little early, 30 minutes, the next day and started working. When my daughter texted that she was getting the tractor out, I took a break and went outside to meet her and bring the feeder back to the house.

    I then evaluated what was needed and realized I needed some wood from the hardware store. Fortunately, I had a meeting scheduled that I didn’t need to speak in, so I started to town while listening to the meeting in the car.

    Multi-tasking FTW.

    I had almost completed my trip to town when the meeting ended. I drove back and went back to work, handling a few tasks, editing an article, etc. Once I thought I had gotten most things done for the day, I took a break.

    It took about 75 minutes to cut some wood and re-attach the pieces and parts in the feeder. I’d cut into my day a bit, but fortunately work is flexible and I can work a little longer on Wednesday to make up for the time missed.

    That extra work will cut into my time to relax, but this is an unexpected issue, and I have to trade time somewhere. Making adult choices, I flexed work to get something in my life done sooner, and spread that flex across two days so that I wasn’t overloaded.

    Less time to relax, but that happens some weeks. Especially with horses.

  • Breaking Down Your Work

    I saw an interesting LinkedIn post on Kyler Murray and how he goes about approaching the game of American football. I don’t know if this meme is true, but certainly, his efforts to prepare have been a reported issue during Murray’s career. The post actually deals with sales and analyzing the reasons for deal success or failure, something I’ve been able to witness at Redgate the last few years. It’s interesting to me to see the sales process examined, though I don’t make sales.

    Incidentally, one of the comments is one I appreciate, referencing Kobe Bryant and the Mamba Mentality. I like the approach of working and asking questions to become better.

    Most of us technical people aren’t thinking of sales, but do we break down and re-examine how we do our jobs? Do we aim to improve the skills we have and develop more depth in the areas we work? I know lots of technical people like learning new skills, but is looking at the improvement (or refinement) of existing skills on your list?

    My experience has been that most people don’t look to grow deeper in many ways. They learn a thing and then often use that skill, but don’t often re-examine to see if they could actually do that thing in a new way. Technology changes, and it’s easy to think that the way you write SQL or build servers or implement security is good enough. It can pay to not only learn new things, but re-examine your existing patterns and practices to see if there are better ways to accomplish those tasks.

    This is where the one year of experience repeated ten times comes about with candidates who don’t interview well. They’ve been repeating patterns without improving them.

    I promote the idea of regularly improving your skills, sharpening your tools, and growing your abilities in a way that provides value for your employer and ensures you have a successful career.

    This is going to be more important in the future, especially with AI impacting the way many managers view technical work.

    Steve Jones

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

    Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.