Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Forward Deployed Engineers

    I recently recorded a session with Ken Muse and a Redgate Flyway Solution Engineer. It was a fun session using GitHub and AI, and better managing the code in an automated fashion to bring some determinism to AI coding. I’m hoping it will be released soon, and you can see a vision of how you can better wrangle your AI agents and reduce risk and increase reliability.

    When we started our discussion, Ken noted that he is an AI forward deployed engineer for GitHub. His job is to work with teams in how to use agentic coding. When we were first prepping, I had never heard the Forward Deployed Engineer title, which is apparently getting popular. It was in an issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Deep Dives last year, and I must have missed that issue. Apparently, this is a role that works part of the time with customer teams and part of the time with product or engineering teams.

    In other words, a software engineer with a new title who gets paid more than a software engineer.

    Titles are always a funny thing to me. I’ve seen people who write computer code go from programmers to developers to software engineers to forward deployed engineers. The job is the same. I work with a team of others who write code, or I work with a customer who wants code and might need help writing it. Or, if I’m working at a company that works with outside customers, this is really a consultant role renamed.

    DBAs have had a similar change. I started as a DBA because they made a lot of money at the time. I moved from programmer to DBA, without much change in skill, but with a nice pay rise at a new company. I left that role before we got Data Engineers, Site Reliability Engineers, Database Reliability Engineers, and who knows what else. However, if I had stayed in a company, I’m sure I would have been changing my title periodically to earn more money.

    Certainly, I’d still have been adding skills that give me a reason to change my title, but I’m not sure the job would have changed. Instead, I’d be trying to grow my career not only with seniority and time, but with new skills and title changes.

    Maybe that’s a good reason to keep learning new skills. New skills let you claim you need a new title. Hopefully, you pick a title that HR doesn’t have any data about, so they have to set a new range for the position that’s above your current range.

    Viola! Instant raise.

    Not a bad career plan. Just make sure you’re adding some skills that are asked for in job descriptions, including soft skills. After all, a forward deployed engineer is going to be working with others, so communication is going to be key.

    Steve Jones

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  • I Can’t Make You Learn

    Oh, how I wish I could make you learn. How I wish I could coach, guide, inspire, or even bribe you to learn more about your job, or things related to your job, or even things in life. I wish all of you would improve your skills, but more, I wish you would want to improve your skills. I find lots of people who do want to get better at things, but far too often, people aren’t trying to improve because they want to coast along at their jobs. Or really, anywhere.

    I get it. You’re stressed and busy at work, though hopefully not too often. You have challenges at home, kids to raise, parents getting older, financial stresses, concerns about politics or sports or exercise or diet or just about anything in the world. We all have things that take mental energy in our lives. How/why/when should I add another thing to the list?

    My view in the past has been that I invest in my knowledge and my skills because that helps me in the future. Whether that’s learning to write better T-SQL, or it’s learning a new thing about T-SQL, or it’s learning how to find information about the new thing in T-SQL. Or it’s something completely different. In the past, I’ve spent time learning to write better with a blog, knowing this might lead to a future job, but also to experiment and decide how much I liked writing. I’ve learned to organize presentations better, partially because I wanted to impress people at a user group, but also because I knew this skill would help me argue for a raise or communicate well in a job interview.

    I thought about this recently as a fan switch went out at the ranch. That’s not related to work, but I like to learn everywhere in my life. We have a whole house fan that cools the house at night. Someone else installed it years ago, but the switch stopped working. My wife wanted to call someone right away, as none of us are a) electricians, or b) have worked on a hard-wired fan. However, I thought this couldn’t be difficult. It’s worth a small experiment. I ordered a part that was vaguely familiar to the broken switch, not having much confidence that it would work.

    My son and I found the breaker (which was an adventure) and disabled it. We disassembled the switch, matched up wires, and replaced the switch. We turned on the breaker and were excited that the fan worked. We of course, had another adventure putting it back together, as the first time things didn’t work when we enabled the breaker, but we solved the issue. A couple of hours in total and $40 for a switch when it would have been easy to call someone and (likely) spend $150 or more.

    I always ask questions when work is being done. Whether that’s a tradesperson doing building or repair work, or a fellow tech professional writing code, or a fellow marketer authoring content. I want to learn to be self-sufficient and more capable. Even if there are things I’d really never do and happily pay someone to do them, I want to know how they are done.

    At the very least, I want to be able to judge future quality. That’s a skill I need with electricians and AI technology.

    Steve Jones

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  • Un-Migrating From the Cloud: T-SQL Tuesday #199

    This month we have a very interesting invitation from Koen Verbeeck. He has hosted once before, and agreed to help me out this month by tackling another topic. We’ve shared a few beers in the EU, though not in some time, so I hopefully will get the chance to buy him a pint and thank him for this month’s invite.

    He was inspired by another friend, Alexander Avidsson, who wrote about skills and the cloud, but with an interesting take. This month’s invite is about moving back on-premises from the cloud, which is something I’ve had a few customers do, or start doing. Nothing is quick when migrating systems, either to or from the cloud.

    Here’s my take.

    How Easy Is It To Un-Migrate?

    I decided on a fun title here, since so many people talk about migrating to the cloud. Is going back on-premises an un-migration? Or a re-migration? Just a migration? I won’t worry about the semantics.

    I work with a lot of different customers at Redgate Software. Whether they are discussing development topics (Prompt/Toolbelt), deployment issues (Flyway), production stuff (Monitor) or compliance (all of the above + TDM), I find that most of them are still rooted in an on-premises mindset. Even when they’ve migrated to the cloud, it’s often lift-and-shift, with VMs running in AWS/Azure/GCP. In that sense, they still tend to manage things in an on-premises way.

    They’re more comfortable with those skills and more confused by cloud auth systems, still. In 2026.

    I think that’s still the norm and it’s easy to think that most people work in the cloud all the time. Some do, and I think most people have some familiarity with one of the major cloud systems, but I would expect that lots of people would love to come back on-premises.

    Is it easy? No. It’s another migration, and while you might find it easy to re-provision hardware (whether purchased or rented from another provider like Rackspace) there are still major data movement challenges in the db world. How do I sync systems? Can I get log backups? What type of quiescing and cutover is there?

    The tech stuff, matching versions, etc. is likely easy. After all, most of us don’t use the latest and greatest functions from SQL Server, so moving back to on-premises likely just works. If you are in the IaaS world, this is simple, other than the latency of copying data down (and explaining the egress charges).

    I actually think customers might gain some efficiencies from moving systems with known workloads and costs back on-premises. Especially those that create lots of tickets for DBAs or developers. Any time spent moving back will come back in the skills that so many have with on-premises systems.

    The one downside I think might cause some issues is HA. It’s easy in the cloud, and hard on-premises. Those are skills that some people likely need to brush up on if they don’t have a significant HA footprint with VMs.

  • Would You Retire Rather Than …

    Bjarne Stroustrup is the creator of C++. I read a few of his books and alternately loved what he’d done with the language and hated having to write C++ code in university and at a few jobs. I found it tedious and hard, though arguably better than C once you had a decent set of classes structured. BTW, I love his website, the basic text view of the world, which is how I have built a few sites on my own.

    I caught an interview with him and this short response on AI and coding. He had this quote: “Senior developers are already retiring rather than deal with it.” He doesn’t love the results from AI, which is fine. And it’s not what I want to talk about today.

    The idea that senior developers, presumably like Mr. Stroustrup, would rather retire than work on codebases that are being changed by AI is interesting. I suspect that in some problem domains, you might hate AI code and not want to deal with it, but would you retire? Is that the answer?

    I have known some IT people who retired because they didn’t like their jobs. My wife left tech because it was too stressful, but it wasn’t an easy decision. She’s questioned it a few times, but she had a passion for something else and wanted a new job. I think that in both cases, someone moved towards something rather than away from something. They had another thing they wanted to do in their lives.

    I wonder how many of you would really retire or leave your job because you don’t like the work. Most people I know who don’t like the work are looking for something else to do until they retire. I would be sad to hear about someone who is hanging on to a bad job until they retire, especially if retirement isn’t coming soon (like the next 2-3 years). I would also hate to think that some people see AI as making their job so un-enjoyable that they decide to retire earlier than they expected.

    I do have a good friend who was close to retiring in his early 60s. He decided it was too soon and took another job after his previous employer was sold and closed their local office. He’s spent a little over a year working remotely and he doesn’t like it. He’s going to retire this year because he doesn’t like the job and doesn’t want to look for a new one. He is close enough to retiring that he’s looking to the future doing less and finding a way to enjoy life without work.

    AI might force some people out of the industry, but I think it’s more likely that there are other factors, like a poor work environment, bad management, or some other factor. However, if you disagree, let me know. If you would stop working because you don’t want to deal with data or technology, let me know. As always, if you don’t want to post publicly, message me and I’ll post something anonymously for you.

    Steve Jones

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

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