Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Moving in the Post Pandemic World

    After a few months of the pandemic lockdown this year, my company gave people the option of leaving the local area where our headquarters is located and moving to another part of England. Actually, since we aren’t planning on anyone coming into an office in 2020, we allowed people to move away from the cities where we are located, with a request that they remain in the same country.

    A number of companies have followed similar suit, most notably a number of big tech companies. Google has said that workers will be remote until July 2021, while Twitter has allowed workers to do so permanently.  Facebook is allowing workers to leave Silicon Valley, but their salaries may be adjusted. All are disruptive actions, and may forever change the culture for these companies.

    Remote work is changing the high tech west coast of the US. This will reshape that area, not just for these companies, but for many others that have had a symbiotic relationship with works. Restaurants, car dealers, rental business, and more will be affected. Certainly some cheer the move, upset with the price inflation and crowds that the booming tech companies brought with them.

    Personally I want to go back to an office. I miss seeing people periodically. Some others feel that way, but I’m sure plenty of people like working remotely and would appreciate the freedom to live elsewhere.

    Today, I want to ask you where that is. If your company said you could move and live somewhere else, anywhere, where would that be?

    Let’s assume that you could keep the same salary. You’d still have to manage meetings and contact with the people work with now, so changing too many time zones would be a challenge. However, dream a bit and think about how you would restructure your life if your company allowed you to do so.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • The Habits of Better Teams

    As a developer, I’ve often worked with a team of others, where we discussed the software we were building, what architectures and patterns to adopt, etc. While we all learned to work together, there were plenty of times that it felt as if we were working separately on code, but arguing often about how to make a decision about a technical approach or a priority.

    As a DBA, I’ve often worked alone, though usually interfacing with different teams as needed. In these cases, I’ve often had to learn to make my own decisions and then justify those to others later. The few times I worked with a team of DBAs, it seemed as though this was still the model, independent work, though with everyone deferring to the senior DBA.

    Building a team takes work, and it can be difficult to do so without the support of management. I’m always amazed at how many managers undermine the building of a high performing team, often in contrast to their words or the company’s statements. Many don’t even realize how poorly they promote teamwork, or how they actively prevent it.

    Assuming you can get support, what do you want in your team? I saw a neat post on the habits of high performing teams. These are some of the things you want to install in all your members. I’ve rarely had high psychological safety, though I think we do now at Redgate. I especially like the idea of leveling experience points. I hadn’t thought about it in these terms, but that makes perfect sense to me.

    That last section, where we assume our peers are competent and intelligent resonates with me. I haven’t always done this in the past, but I have tried hard later in my career to listen more, and to assume others are working with the best information they have. Perhaps that’s different than my information, so I should try to have a discussion, not a lecture or a dismissal of their effort.

    That’s something I wish I would have learned a lot earlier in my career.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Debating #PASSSummit Pre Cons for Monday

    I’ll be speaking at the PASS Summit in 2020, and I have some things to prepare for that. I get a conference admission for the event and access for a year, so I’m not too pressed to spend 3 days sitting in live sessions.

    However, I can always use training. I also want to support PASS this year during a pandemic, life and business altering event.

    I’d like to take a pre-con, at least one on Monday. This post looks at my choices for Monday. It’s a little stream of consciousness, trying to think through a few things.

    Tl;dr – I choose Building Power BI Reports that Communicate Insights and Engage People from Meagan Longoria. If you want to know more about her class, check out her promotional video.

    The Monday List

    When I look at the page of pre-cons available, there are a lot of great choices for Monday. The list is:

    My first thoughts is they’re all friends. Maybe a strange thing, but I’ve shared an adult drink with all these people, some of them many times. I’ve had one on one conversations, met many of their partners, and even been in some of their houses.

    They are also outstanding in their fields. All of them could teach me quite a bit, even in areas where I have some knowledge. As much as I’m overjoyed to see Rob every chance I get, I think that an intro to PoSh is out. The Edge stuff from Kevin is interesting, but way outside of my area. I’m not sure how helpful this is personally or professional for my current role, so I’ll skip this. I’ve seen Chris talk Python, and it’s great. I like his style and approach, and I recommend this one, but I’ve dabbled a bunch in Python and in Data Science. I keep working through a few resources in this area at times, so I’ll skip this.

    Everything else is interesting in some way. I’ve never taken a full class from Itzik, though I have enjoyed a number of sessions. It is tempting to try and learn a few more complex T-SQL queries from him live. It’s different than reading his work, and it might give me ideas for work. Worth considering.

    Learning more about Azure is good. I’ve been wanting to study for the Azure fundamentals exam, even saved this blog from SSC today:https://mostafaelmasry.com/2020/08/22/azure-dp-900-data-fundamental-certification-perpetration/ . I worry slightly this might be too general and full of practical stuff that would be good to know, but might not help me with the exam. At the same time, this is likely good info that might help me write more questions and content. I’m moving this slightly down my list.

    Perf tuning is always good. I need to write more content here, as I think we’re lacking some at SSC, but I don’t have a lot of desire to focus here right now. I think this will be like some of the Brent Ozar classes I did, which were good, and I learned things, but likely this will repeat some stuff I know and just haven’t kept organized in my head. I love Pinal, and I’ve heard this is a good session (he’s done it before), but I’m going to skip it.

    I don’t really run servers, but doing things to help your virtual environments run well is always good to learn. I’ve only lightly worked with the admin side of VMWare and Hyper-V. I can’t quite decide if this helps me personally or professionally. I think it would provide me with some knowledge and content, but I think it’s less likely than some other things, so I’m going to pass.

    Power BI is fascinating to me. I think it’s a transformational tool for many companies that deploys interactive visualizations. I learned quite a bit while working my way through the Stairway series on SSC, but I know I barely know anything. This one is as tempting as Itziks.

    That leaves Ben’s Kubernetes session. Ultimately, I do think the future of SQL Server and lots of data platforms will be containers, and K8s. However, I don’t think many of us want to know the ins and outs of K8s. We want AWS, Azure, or someone else to run most aspects of the platforms, and while I’m sure I’d learn something, I think this is also less useful for now. I’d like to attend this late.

    The Finalists

    I’m really down to three choices now: T-SQL with Itzik, Azure with Denny, or Power BI with Meagan. These would all improve my career, and help me with my job, as well as being relevant. They’re all relevant, but also in areas that I struggle to really focus on for a long period of time.

    I’d like to think there are other resources I can use for Azure, and I am thinking to just try and go through some study here to take the exam, so I’m going to cut Denny’s. A hard choice, but that’s what I need to do.

    For the other two, I don’t really know what to do. I went back and re-read both descriptions a bit, trying to decide what I’ll learn. I know I’ll get in depth T-SQL from Itzik, and I would like to improve my query skills. I often find myself amazed by the queries some of the people post in the SQLServerCentral forums. However, I also know that Itzik does this class for different events. Even thought I skipped it in the past, I think I might get another chance. In fact, there are a couple pre-cons for the Data Platform Summit.

    Therefore, I’m going to sign up for Meagan’s class, update Power BI Desktop, go through the last couple articles in the Stairway, and see if I can learn a few things about building reports.

  • Social: Respecting Names

    This is a non-technical post, and my opinion. If you don’t want to read it, please ignore future posts with “Social:” at the start of the title.

    My nickname is Steve. Actually, it’s my middle name, but it’s a name I chose and I decided that I wanted to go by that moniker. I used to dread the first day of school as a kid when teachers would take attendance and use my name. I didn’t want them to use it, and I’ve certainly had my share of giggles or jokes directed my way during my youth. It got to the point where I learned in high school and college to go to class early and have a private moment with a teacher and ask them to call me Steve.

    It was annoying, stressful, and honestly, rarely a problem. However, a few times I had teachers that refused to use nicknames, and I hated going to their classrooms. Heck, I likely thought I hated them. I’m not sure how far that hatred would go in different situations in the real world, but I had no respect for those individuals and tried to never interact with them.

    In some sense, the world has changed a lot. My kids have gone to school with classmates that have all sorts of names, from different cultures and strange spellings. They accept them all and address them however they wish to be addressed.

    To me, that’s one sign of progress. Names that would have been made fun of or blatantly laughed at over and over during my childhood, are just accepted as the way it is. I see this even in my rural county.

    These days in a professional environment, I couldn’t imagine ignoring a co-worker’s wishes. If someone asked me to call them Jack when their name is Joseph or Sally when their name is Sandra, I would. I coached a kid for a couple years as Katie. She asked me at some point to call her Kate, and I did. Her Mom forgot constantly and referred to her as “Katie”, and I could see how annoyed the young lady would get. I remembered my experience and acceded to her wishes.

    When I read Randolph West’s recent article, I was reminded of my youth, reminded of how I wouldn’t ignore the wishes of someone I knew well, and questioned why I, or anyone, wouldn’t just be polite to others and address them as they would prefer.

    I find the idea of referring to a singular person as “they” to be strange. But how hard is that to change? If Randolph asked me to call them “Buddy”, would I object? Why is a pronoun harder than a noun? It’s not, and I’m working to adjust.

    I find the same thing to be true of other references, nouns or pronouns, that people find objectionable. Often I don’t think the term is offensive, but that’s my view. Is it really that hard to change my language, my writing, my speech to treat someone else as they’d like to be treated?

    It’s not. It might be annoying for me. It might be uncomfortable. Heck, I’ll make mistakes. I’ve apologized to Kate a few times. Not that many because I learned quickly, and she was worth the effort to learn to do better.

    I think most of us feel it’s worth the effort for those that we are close to, or that we know. Why would it be harder to adjust for those we don’t know, and respect their wishes.

    I’m sure I’ll mess up with Randolph, but it’s on my mind to do better. I actually typed “him” above and caught myself, adjusting to the unfamiliar “they”. I even learned to ignore the grammar checker and let it know that I know better in this case.

    Learn, adapt, grow. Many of us do this all the time in technology. We ought to do it in our dealings with others as well.