Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

Wellness Week

I work for a great company, one that I feel cares about me as more than a “resource”, gives me opportunities (with responsibility and accountability, and has some nice benefits. I actually used one of those last week. I get a volunteer day every year, where I can spend time with a charity and get the day off. I used mine to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity in Denver.

During the last two years, Redgate has approached the pandemic and remote work with the idea that we need to be reasonable with each other. We need to understand that some employees might have more people in their homes during work hours and may need to provide care for others. They might have other challenges, or just be struggling to cope. We were asked to work with people, rather than against them, and try to support each other as best we could. I think it worked out well, and it showed us that company cares about us.

I know some other companies have done this, though not many. When a friend talks about how their employer supported them or others in difficult times, it’s always a surprise, and I am often impressed with how the organizations behave. I thought about that last month when I saw Spotify take a “wellness week” where they closed all their offices for a week. It won’t necessarily cure stress and overwork, but it is a bonus chance to let some people unwind.

A few organizations have closed between Christmas and New Year’s, or around the holidays, often when they don’t have much business taking place. Often this is a chance for them to avoid some costs, and a fair number of them have done this without paying people for that time. It doesn’t affect white-collar workers, but it does affect blue-collar ones, and I think that’s a very poor message to send to your staff. Giving people an option of more time off is nice, but don’t prevent them from working if they need the paycheck.

Lots of organizations slow down around this time of year, and they accept a lower amount of work getting done. I think that’s a better strategy, especially if you give people more flexibility to spend time with family or take care of business. Personally, I’d like to see more companies close down for the week and pay employees. If you’re not accomplishing much, maybe you should accept that and gain some goodwill by giving people a break.

I know there are lots of roles where this isn’t easy. Knowledge workers have it easy compared to those that need to interact with people or things in the real world. We do know, however, the engaged and happy workers will do a better job. They’ll get more done, and they’ll produce more quality work. I like the idea of “wellness time” where possible to give employees a break. Even if you had to split your employees into two groups and give each half a break during different days, it might be a good investment to make in your staff.

Steve Jones

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

December 22, 2021
Acknowledging Success

Today is the Redgate annual award event, and I’m honored to be hosting again. I’ve been asked a few times, and I used to look forward to the gathering in Cambridge followed by our annual Christmas party. Last year this was virtual, as it is this year, so I’m hosting again from my home office. Not what I had hoped would happen, but I’ll have some fun. Last year I had a number of shirt changes between my parts, and I may do that again.

I know there are often annual sales awards in many companies, usually with some vacation or prize being given out, but not a lot outside of the sales department. In most of my jobs, we’ve usually had some sort of holiday party, but nothing else for most employees.

As we approach the end of the year, I wonder if you find your organization doing any sort of recognition for your work this year? Or maybe highlighting those that have gone above and beyond what is expected? At Redgate, we have nominations in various categories. Some are sales-oriented, but we have an open award category as well as an ingeniously simple one. We’ve had people or groups from different parts of the company win that one.

I think that recognition of effort and work accomplished is important for the morale and motivation of employees. When management recognizes people for their hard work and lets other employees have input into the process, you build a better team of people working together. Even when we aren’t the winners, we can appreciate the effort that others put into improving the organization.

My view is that few too few in the management of organizations appreciate the value of employees, especially the knowledge workers. Replacing people is hard, and it is expensive. Unmotivated people do less work and do it less well. I hope that more organizations learn this and start to put effort into valuing those that contribute to everyone’s success.

Steve Jones

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

December 13, 2021
Worse Before Better

There was a thread on Twitter on career longevity and fixing issues inside an organization. IT notes that often there is a problem and someone is assigned or hired to fix them. Often when someone starts to dig in, they can fix some things and reduce the pain. That’s good, as things get better.

However, as you gain more knowledge of the issue, sometimes you realize there are more fundamental problems. If you try to fix them, you might make things worse. This could result in a repeat of the process of worsening and bettering of the problems over time. You might not make much progress if new people are constantly assigned when things get worse. If you stick with the person that is working on underlying problems, things get better over the long term. I don’t know how often I find management willing to stick with the same person.

I think my experience has often been that organizations engage in short-term thinking. They just try to patch an issue and don’t necessarily make things better over time. I certainly saw this with supporting Windows systems in the 90s. We often rebooted machines first, which “fixed” the problem. At least for then. Often the issue would repeat, but customers could reboot their own machines.

Is that the right approach? It could be, if a long-term fix requires lots of resources, perhaps a regular set of reboots from people is a better tradeoff. In a more complex system, usually, we find someone fixing a short-term software issue with code that is less reliable, or even less upgradable in the future. How many times do we see code that has a comment to “not touch this” or a note that the last developer didn’t understand this, but it worked. We end up with spaghetti code that no one maintains, doesn’t want to touch, and it inhibits our ability to grow and react to new requirements.

Good fundamentals make a difference in how we build and maintain systems. This is especially true in databases, as we have to live with their design for a long time. We need to be agile, but we should apply good database modeling and integrity practices as we do so. Making quick decisions on how to add something to a schema is fine, but do so in line with best practices and an eye on the future.

Steve Jones

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

December 8, 2021
Getting Started with the Advent of Code as a #SQLNewBlogger

Another post for me that is simple and hopefully serves as an example for people trying to get blogging as #SQLNewBloggers.

If you want to get started blogging, or revitalize your work, here is a good way to practice some T-SQL, have some fun, and build a blog.

This is a simple set of steps, but all of these will help you in the future as you expand your skills and blogging.

Online Accounts

First, create a blog. Go to WordPress and create an account for free.

Get a GitHub account. No reason to not have one these days, and it’s free. I won’t walk you through this part, but sign up.

Next, create a repository. In the repositories section, click “New” in the upper right. You can see my AdventofCode repository is already created. Make your own in your account.

Next, go to the Advent of Code site and log in with Github. It’s one of the auth settings. Don’t worry if you aren’t doing this in time with others. I’ve worked on this throughout the year. You can also go through previous years if you choose.

The Workstation Setup

First, install Git. This is easy and free as well. Once you have, open a command prompt. Pick a place where you want to store code and create a “git” folder. Change to this folder.

In your Advent of Code repository, click the “Code” button in the upper right. This will open a drop down. Copy the https URL shown in there. You can see mine highlighted below.

In your command prompt, type “git clone “ (space here), then paste in your repo path and hit Enter. It should look something like this:

This has downloaded the repo to this folder and linked it with my GitHub repo. This will be empty for you, but here’s what I’d suggest. Create a “2021” folder and then start putting code in there. You can see I have a few folders listed below.

Inside the 2021 folder, I tend to separate out days. For me, I do this because I save the input files as input.txt. You can organize your code any way you want, but write about how and why. Here’s my folder.

I have solved problems multiple ways in the past. Here’s last year’s Day 1, solved in T-SQL, Python, and PowerShell.

Now write code and solve the puzzles.

Saving Code

You should learn git, but here is the easy way to do things. As you write code, run a “git status” in your repo (any folder). You’ll either see everything is clean and up to date, or something like this:

When you want to save something, type “git add –all”. This adds all files to the staging area. There isn’t a return here, but if you run status, you’ll see things are staged.

Now commit a version with this:

git commit –m “xxxx”

Replace XXX with some comment. For me, I often will say which days I’ve solved. In this case, I haven’t solved day 4 yet, but I just added a note.

Now type “git push” to send your code to GitHub. You’ll get something like this.

That’s it.

Now you’ve learned how to move code around and source control it, you have puzzles to play with, and you can blog about how to approach problems, and how you are saving code. In fact, rewrite this post as you set up your own environment.

SQLNewBlogger

Here’s a great way to showcase knowledge and improve skills. This post took me about 15 minutes to setup and outside of creating accounts or installing git, I bet you could do it in the same time.

Give it a try. Start your blog today.

December 8, 2021