Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Are You a Gatekeeper?

    One of the problems that I’ve seen in many parts of life is the belief that things must proceed a certain way. I caught an article on ways teachers have made school less fun for kids because they adhered to some rule or belief too tightly. I think many of those stories are true because I’ve seen some strange teacher behavior with my kids over the years.

    In the tech world we’ve gotten our share of gatekeepers who think that a developer or sysadmin or some other person doing a job should do it a certain way or use particular tools. I caught a tweet that embodies the frustration some people have with those gatekeepers. Jez Humble quoted this and built a thread on this, including admitting he’s contributed to the problem. I know I have as well.

    If you think back in how you’ve worked with others, interviewed people, onboarded a new hire, or even disagreed with another person, are you a gatekeeper? Do you have strong, core beliefs that you think everyone should follow? Or are you adaptable and flexible, willing to consider slightly different thoughts, protocols, or ways of viewing problems?

    I think that many of the advances and incredible achievements in the world have some from someone thinking differently. Someone, or a group of people that grow, change, or alter something in the world make the biggest differences. We have best practices, we have standards, and we have good, solid ways of working in many cases. We also learn to become better over time in many cases, changing the way we work because of the growth in our knowledge.

    I think teams ought to come to some consensus and agreement. We have to make decisions and move forward in our efforts to build software and systems. However, we also need to allow debate, discussion, and civil disagreement. I argue for many points at work, winning people over on some, and losing other debates. I don’t always like it, but I can live with it if more people disagree with me. I think that most of us can do the same, as long as there are rational reasons for the final decision.

    Being a gatekeeper often involves having power and abusing it because you can, rather than building and generating some sort of group agreement. Real leaders find ways to work with their people, not force them to fit a mold.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • Enriching Your Life

    As I was looking to build career goals for the new year, I think mostly about technical topics. That makes sense, given my focus and job, but I ran across an interesting thread on Hacker News that asked about skills to work on in 2020, and not necessarily technical ones.

    I did find it interesting that one of the first comments was self improvement, and quite a few comments on cooking, both as a skill to learn and a way to save money. There are plenty of comments on other non-technical skills, but since this is a technical site, I wanted to focus there.

    We’re over a third of the way into the year, and we’re dealing with a pandemic. Business is slow, many people have lost employment, and it’s possible many more will. Fewer companies are hiring, so there is a need to stand out more if you find yourself looking for a new job.

    With that in mind, what types of things would you work on if you knew you’d need a new job by the end of the year. Let’s say that you have seven months to prepare to look for a new job on Jan 1. What would you work on?

    Leave a comment and let us know today.

    Steve Jones

  • Investing in Speed

    While most of us might not want to start our own company (or maybe we do), we can learn a few things from those that do. Building something new, being efficient, effective, and quick are skills needed when starting a company. I’ve read a lot about how companies are built and entrepreneurs work. Lately I ran across some advice from Daniel Gross, the founder of Pioneer, a former partner at Y-Combinator (from David Perell).

    Many of us are financially careful. We often are careful with how and where we spend money at home. I find lots of tech professionals frugal at work as well, often being careful with their budgets, or even with the requests they make of managers. That being said, here is a great quote:

    “Overbearing frugality prevented me from spending any money, which creates inefficiencies. Spend like a king on speed, like a pauper on everything else. Faster computer? Go. Faster Internet? Go. Better sleep? Go. Expensive dinner? Stop. Expensive dinner to close a candidate? Go. If you can, use your capital to move faster. Your competitor is taking the shorter flight. Book it.”

    Often I see companies get caught up spending or not spending based on some ideas that don’t have anything to do with efficiency. They don’t invest in things that improve the business, but invest in things they like, or avoid things they don’t like. I see this with choices as well, where a professional or manager may want to change a tool/platform/etc. because they like one over the other. Often without any good fundamental reason.

    Spending money isn’t bad if you are investing in driving your business forward. Learn to make that distinction and don’t be afraid of making good investments. It’s fine to indulge in anything, but in moderation. That might be the key to success for many hings in life.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

  • What does the Future DBA Do?

    The database administrator (DBA) role has always been a strange one to many organizations. Some companies embrace the role, some don’t. Some hire DBAs, some expect others to handle those duties. The others could be sysadmins for other systems or developers, or maybe everyone might just assume someone else is handling backups, index maintenance, and more. Often those latter companies will have issues at some point when they need to recover a system or performance is extremely poor.

    As cloud computing has become more popular, there have been quite a few pieces about how the DBAs job is changing. Often the response to these items is one of two things. Either people agree and talk about a completely new way they will need to work and new skills they must acquire, or they are sure nothing will really change.

    I think both things are true. I’m not sure that if you are a DBA now that your work in your current role will change that much. Sure, the company might add some new tasks, new resources, ask you to learn now things but often if your company hasn’t embraced a lot of change, your job isn’t changing. Even if your company adopts some cloud computing.

    I just wonder if this is your last job. I hope this is mine, but for many people, they can expect a new employer at some point. If that is likely, then are you positioned for your next job?

    I ran across a piece on how the DBA job might change, and I think there are things to think about here. There are five items to look at, and all of them relate to the cloud’s influence on DBAs. While I don’t know that most, or even lots, of companies will adopt the Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) or have their DBs be a utilty in the PaaS sense, I do think DBAs should strive to make the database a utility for both ops staff and developers. There is a surprising amount of effort here, and I do hope things like the Spawn project from Redgate change the way we work with databases in the future.

    I do think that if you need to seek a new employer, and new opportunities, your general skills will matter. Being an amazing T-SQL guru or incredible AG admin might be highly valued in your current role, but often hiring managers might want to be sure you know something about a wide variety of things, from AI/ML to Power BI to working in the cloud. Your ability to learn, collaborate, and discuss intelligently different aspects of database work will be important.

    If you think you might need another job, think about acquiring the skills for your next job today.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.