Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Poor Work Management

    The future of how we will work is uncertain. Every time I read something or talk to someone, I hear different thoughts and experiences, which influence how I feel. Actually, I’m not sure how I feel. Some companies are pushing back their office openings (Google, Microsoft) to a future time, while others are bringing people back part or full time. I had lunch with some friends working at a financial institution, and they are allowed to work at home a day or two a week, but otherwise, they’re in the office every week. I know some other people that are back in the office five days a week.

    There are mixed feelings among many people. While I don’t know many technology people that want to be in the office every day, some do want the option to go periodically to the office. Depending on your commute, you might feel differently, as there are plenty of data pros that want to remain at home full time. Both groups, however, feel that we can be effective at our jobs while working remotely.

    Not all management feels thtat same way, for various reasons. I ran across this piece that speculates that poor management is more likely to fear remote work than embrace it. The example in the piece, from Cathy Merill, certainly seems to indicate this is the case. While I’ve seen some great managers, I feel many managers aren’t good at adapting to dramatic changes and struggle to change their own view of how to do their job.

    I do think culture suffers when we can’t get together in person. Hallway conversations and chats over coffee aren’t as easy remotely, and we don’t build the same bond we get in the office. Working separately at home can work, and we’ve had a lot of success at Redgate, but I also feel more separate from lots of co-workers and miss the chance to get together and catch up. The remote meetings are not the same, and scheduling a quick call is much more of an intrusion than being able to walk by someone’s desk or stop for a minute when I see them in the hall.

    Perhaps it’s the energy from being around lots of people that CEOs and other management miss. It can be invigorating and exciting when lots of people are working together towards a common goal and succeeding. Perhaps management prefers to look someone in the eye and put pressure on them for a lack of performance. That is harder to do virtually, and I know lots of managers that work through intimidation.

    There’s also the investment made in offices. Over the years I’ve seen various configurations and amenities in offices, often to encourage more work and comfort away from home. I know plenty of CEOs and leaders that feel this investment needs to be used by staff for lots of hours each week because of the cost, which seems like a poor excuse to me. That money is spent. These days I suspect more employees push back on longer hours, as they should, and find comfort at home, which might also bother management.

    This issue is complex, but I do know that whether we’re remote or in an office, we can be effective and get work done in teams. Management should know that and use it to try and build an environment that gets the most out of all their staff, whether in the office or remote.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Help Your Manager

    Most of us have some sort of review with a manager on a regular basis. It might be once a year, once a quarter, or even monthly. Some of us like these, and some don’t (me), but the review is often a way to assist your manager in evaluating how you are performing in your job. This is quite common, and I’ve gotten used to this, though I never really like the process.

    I do know reviews are important. This is a time when you have an opportunity to shape your career. A good impression here can help you with a raise, a promotion, even the choice of a project or work you want to do in the future. I learned early on in my career that these reviews were important.

    I also learned that my manager often wasn’t up to date on what I’d done across the last time period. I used to have annual reviews, but even with quarterly reviews, managers have their own career (and review) to worry about, other employees to worry about, and they can lose track of your accomplishments.

    I saw a link in the Brent Ozar newsletter listing things that your manager might not know. Not everything on the list would be things that I cover in a review, but these are things to think about as you look to tailor your job to suit you. If you want something fixed or are having issues, make sure you explicitly call these out to your manager. Not imply something is bothering you, but directly state what you want or what is wrong.

    Read the list, but for me, the important things are to track the extra things I’ve done, the things that impact the company, or that help other people. If I save the company money, or better, increase revenue in some way, I want to make a note and bring those notes to my review. If I spend extra time to make someone else’s job easier, bring that up.

    Your manager often doesn’t know the details of what you do across time. Usually, they do track the current tasks, but they often don’t remember at review time what you did 3 or 6 months ago. Often I don’t either.

    That’s why I keep notes about my successes. They help me drive my career forward in the direction I want it to move. It can help you as well but start keeping track of things today, as a way to prep for review time.

    Steve Jones

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

  • Goal Progress for August 2021

    I set goals at the beginning of the year, and I’m tracking my progress in these updates during 2021.

    I’m late in putting this out, but here goes.

    Current Grade: C-

    I left the grade the same, as I’ve made some progress, but not much. Time is running out, I’m getting busy, and I realize I didn’t do a good job really thinking of the workload this year. I’ll review this next month.

    Reading

    The goal was 4 books (3 non-fiction, 1 tech).  I finished one in early July, and found a few more to add to the list. I haven’t been sure what to read, but I found a few career books. Now I need to find a tech book for the second half of the year.

    Here’s the current progress:

    No book review, so that’s a failure.

    I am enjoying the GE book, as I thought I would work there at one point. It’s interesting, mostly from a business and finance perspective, but I like thinking about this from a business point of view.

    Technical Skills

    You can read about these goals in my yearly post (linked above), but for now, no change.

    That’s not great.

    Projects

    No real project work here in August. I did speak to a couple user groups, and I guess I helped them move forward with a hybrid meeting.  I’m calling the UG one half done, as one group is dead for now.

    • SQL Saturday Inc – 90%. We own the trademark!
    • Support events: Minor calls here.
    • Speak at the 3 local user groups, at least one live presentation – 50%
    • Help organize a Denver/Colorado event, live or virtual – 50% (more conversations)
    • Complete my Power BI Volleyball report – I know lots of kids will use this, so I need to get it done – 70%
    • SQL Memorial – 90% – I updated this, sadly, as someone passed. I need to move this to straight GitHub Pages and get the custom domain set.

  • Better SQL is a Good Career Investment

    Many of us reading this are data professionals, and we likely know quite a bit about SQL in general. We may use T-SQL, specifically, with SQL Server, but many of the skills we have would be portable to other dialects, such as those use in Oracle, PostgreSQL, etc. We’d certainly need to brush up on best practices and which language constructs are better suited for a specific platform, but most of the knowledge transfers.

    I ran across an interesting post on the value of SQL in a career, mostly for someone that might be moving into the data science or machine learning/AI type role. The post notes that lots of these job descriptions mention SQL, but focus quite a bit on R, Python, modeling, etc. In this case, SQL matters, and I’d agree with the author that it matters a lot. Most of the work in those fields is data prep, and SQL makes this much easier at scale than other languages.

    What about those of us that have been working with SQL Server (or some other platform) for awhile? Is learning more about SQL a good investment in our career? In most cases, does our boss even know if we have mediocre or amazing T-SQL skills? Do they care?

    They may not, but I think they should care, and more importantly, you may care. When you know more about the language and how to structure queries to solve problems, you’ll work quicker. You will write code that performs better, resulting in a lower workload on the instances. Your code will last longer, have fewer bugs, and co-workers will trust your work.

    The more you practice with code, the more you solve new problems and learn what works well and what doesn’t, the better you will be at your job.  The time you put into learning to write better queries will pay back with less stress and more time for other tasks. While your boss might not notice your code is better, they certainly will see you as more capable, relaxed, and trustworthy. All good impressions to make at review time.

    Steve Jones

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