Tag: career

There was a short but interesting post on the value of seniority. It’s written from the perspective of someone that gets a new co-worker, but the co-worker is from the future. In fact, it’s the future you. The post is actually titled senior engineers are living in the future.

We (hopefully) are more capable and impressive over time. I would hope most of us are learning more each day and our work reflects that. The code you write today should be better than what you wrote last month or last year. The choices you make, the bugs you solve, the experience you bring to work often does reflect your seniority. Not always, but often.

Sometimes the extra experience you bring is valuable because of the knowledge you gain over time. Most of us have probably known people that seem to be the go-to resources for answers to questions or to solve problems because of the things they’ve learned over time about the environment. This can be frustrating to newer employees, and I’ve certainly seen my son experience that, but it’s one reason why staff who have worked there for more time are valuable.

There’s a point in the post that notes you shouldn’t compare yourself to more senior people. They can seem like they’re from the future because they just know more. Junior people will get there, if they work at learning more.

That’s a big point of focus that I try to emphasize to people that I work with, speak to, or read my editorials. Put effort into your career, learn more, both specific to technology and about the way your company works. Growing your skills, tech, soft, whatever, is a way that you can enhance your career and prove yourself to be more valuable.

It’s a way to make people think you are from the future.

Steve Jones

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

A big part of SQL Server Central has been members of the community answering questions for others. We have an amazing community and over the years, it’s been helpful to so many people. I often get the thanks, but really the people at the top of the all-time list have been those that have helped many people. There are too many to list, but gilamonster, Jeff Moden, lynn-pettis, lowell, and more have been tremendous assets to our community.

Part of the inspiration for StackOverflow years ago was SQL Server Central and the popularity of people helping others. The main thing their founders didn’t like from us (and other sites) was the need to register. Hence, the ability to be anonymous on Stack if you choose. No matter what format or style of Q&A you like, Stack and many other sites have found that there is a lot of desire to ask and answer questions online.

Brent Ozar answers questions regularly during his office hours. I enjoy watching the recordings, especially from the beach. I miss the beach, but I love the mountains, so I’m only a bit jealous. However, recently he had a number of questions come through that he declined to answer and instead put out a post, inviting the community to answer. There are some interesting answers in there, and some are worth reading. Maybe you even want to add your own thoughts to some of the questions.

A big part of my career, and in life outside of my career, is helping others improve their lives. Answering questions for others got me started on this path of SQL Server Central and speaking at conferences. Coaching my kids led me to coach others. Thinking about both those things got me to volunteer at other organizations.

I’ve had success, so I’m paying it forward in different ways. I’d encourage you to do the same. Whether online or in your local community, whether now or at some point in the future, paying it forward is good for your soul.

Steve Jones

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

I think that most of us feel like an impostor at some time in our lives.  We will get asked to do something we’ve never done, with others expressing confidence in us. We may tackle the task, or we may not. We may succeed or we may not In any of those cases, we may still feel like an impostor, someone that isn’t really qualified to do this thing. Many of us continue to feel this way in our careers, suffering from impostor’s syndrome.

While I know that I’m good at my job, good at working with SQL Server and teaching others to do so, I still suffer from impostor syndrome at times. There are periods where my mind wonders if I’ve just gotten lucky and slipped through some evaluation process. Maybe my knowledge hasn’t been well tested. Will someone like my boss, or their boss, question my skills at some point and get rid of me? Will I be able to find another job if that happens? Can I really compete with others out there? This isn’t a constant or regular feeling, but I do experience it at times.

I work with technology, helping customers better manage their database software. However, I also work in marketing, which is a completely different kind of job. Someone in my company posted an article about impostor syndrome for marketing, which I found fascinating. This could be written for technologists or, perhaps, any other profession. Read through it and think about a few things that I saw in the article.

If you feel you don’t have the knowledge you need, you’re not alone. I think that’s very true in technology, where it feels that the pace of change from vendors, from peers, and what you might read in the media (including here at SQL Server Central) can make anyone feel as if they don’t know as much as others. I do try to acknowledge to myself that others feel as I though. It’s slightly comforting, but not a lot. Especially when I converse with some amazing experts. Discussing execution plans with Grant or T-SQL with Jeff or HA with Allan can cause me to question my knowledge and success.

The second thing to think about is how poor the state of the industry can be. Whether this is the skills of others or the architecture of software, systems, or databases. How often have you seen software that’s been purchased or deployed and you question the decisions that got it to this state. Are you amazed at how many problems you see? Do you start to question the skills of others? I know at SQL Server Central we try to help others, but I can also be amazed at the lack of knowledge out there about what I’d consider to be simple topics. At the same time, I recognize others may be in a different place in their journey. Having empathy and compassion keep me answering questions. The need to keep answering them reminds me that I do know quite a few things.

Lastly, education helps. I constantly experiment and build demos of different things. Often these are learning experiments. I don’t know that I become an expert in many of them, but learning more about how something works, or increasing the depth of knowledge in some area I’ve worked help me to build confidence to tackle the challenges I face (or my customers face).

The article notes that marketing is an imprecise science. I think software can be that way as well, despite the growing number of “engineers” in our industry. Like marketing, there are no shortage of people who think they know it all, or use boisterous, blustery, loud discussion to convince others that they do. Even hen their choices or design might be suspect or perhaps their approach is outdated. One of the tenets of DevOps is that we continuously learn and experiment. I try to apply that to my own knowledge, and find it can help me feel like less of an impostor some days.

Not all, but there’s always tomorrow, and I usually find that these feelings pass with time, especially when I apply myself and continue to grown and learn.

Steve Jones

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

When I was starting my career, I expected to be a programmer. That’s what people who wrote the software were called. At some point they adopted “developer” instead, shunning the programmer label. Now I see software engineers has replaced developer in many organizations. I’m not sure the job is much different than it was in 1990, other than the specific technologies used.

The DBA used to do a lot of system administration-type work on database instances. Check logs, set security, run backups, and maybe look at some queries. However, in many cases, their work was limited to things running inside the database software, or the database software itself (patches, related configuration for the host OS, etc.). I saw recently that DBAs have started to adopt the data (or database) engineer label as a new job title. Presumably, this pays more because, well, it sounds like it should. Data Professional sounds more comprehensive and skilled than Database Administrator. Database Engineer sounds better than both.

Is it better? I do think that many people working with databases are being asked to learn and do more (and new) tasks as a part of their daily work. We often need to support and maintain a wider variety of different systems. If it’s the same platform, then we often support more versions, especially with the 2-3 year cycle of releases of SQL Server. However, we may also need to learn a bit about other platforms, like Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc. We can add the ability to work with and deploy new languages, like R or Python, and that might help us land a new position. Certainly understanding cloud database platforms and options, their deployment, and monitoring can be useful in asking for a raise or interviewing for a new position. Scripting, PowerShell, and DevOps are good skills to showcase as well. All of those might be in a Database Engineer description.

Why bother adding these skills? Especially if you have a good job and are comfortable. You never know when things will change. Your company might downsize, as Ken’s did. They might get bought by another organization and your job could change (or disappear). It’s possible that your family situation or some life event might make you look for a different job. There are lots of possible reasons why you need to change your current employment.

If you want a better job, perhaps more compensation, better hours, remote work, less late night calls, or something else, then it’s not a bad idea to beef up your skills. Learn to automate things in a better way, which might make your current job easier. Experiment in the cloud, maybe do a small PoC of how you might move or deploy a current workload into a VM, a PaaS service, or even a new platform. Can you migrate from one database platform to another? That’s a useful skill to showcase.

I have found that a lot of the really good jobs are a hodge-podge of different skills. Being adaptable, comfortable learning, and trying to grow are important skills to demonstrate. Even more important, learning to talk smoothly with others about why you made a decision or recommend something is a key skill to getting hired.

Sprucing up your titles can help, especially with HR where new titles often mean new salary ranges. SRE Engineers were only at Google at one point and their high salaries set a bar. Engineer, Scientist, Architect, these are all better than Administrator. Boost your skills (tech and soft) and you might find a new position that is even better than the one you have today with potentially a new title.

Steve Jones

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