Tag: career

Monica Rathbun wrote a piece on investing in yourself, which I think is a good way to think about spending time and resources on learning. Every time that you spend some brain power on building or improving your skills, you are investing in your career, and giving yourself another way to drive your career in the direction you want to move.

There are no shortage of excuses that Monica lists, and I’ve heard most of them. These are certainly hardships for your career, but these are things that many other people face, both in this industry and others. While these could be a short term reason to just grind out work, none is not a good long term excuse. I can accept you not progressing for a few quarters, but I’d hope you learned something new and helpful to put on your resume or CV every year.

Doctors are constantly reading and learning to keep up in their careers. Lawyers and CPAs often give up weekends on their own to continue learning. Even mechanics, carpenters, electricians, and more are often working through continuing education. Some of it provided or funded by their jobs, some not, but plenty of it takes place outside of work hours. It’s just accepted that growing with your career is the norm.

Most IT people expect they need to keep learning, but I find so many people are unmotivated to do anything their boss won’t provide, whether that’s time or funds. That’s a mistake, in my opinion, as you are one unexpected event from scrambling to find a new job. Plenty of people in that situation find themselves taking a pay cut, getting a longer commute, or finding more stress in their new position.

Continued learning won’t necessarily prevent that, but it does increase the chance that you’ll be a more attractive candidate and perhaps have you pick of positions rather than settling for just some job you don’t want. The more you know, the more you can show, the more you document with a project, a blog, or elsewhere, the more likely someone is to want to hire you. Hopefully that means you find opportunities that suit you, rather than are just available.

Steve Jones

The world is changing. Plenty of people have written about the changes in the job of the DBA (DBAKevlar, Brent Ozar), including myself. While lots of vendors might postulate their database removes the need for a DBA, and some might believe that, I think that’s disingenuous. Microsoft doesn’t hire DBAs, but they hide that job under other titles. We still need DBAs, though the job changes a little in the future.

Recently I saw a post from new PASS Board director, Melody Zacharias, where she notes that DBAs are more important than ever. She gives us five reasons, and I tend to agree with most of them.  There is a need to somehow keep track of and manage data, much of which will continue to live in relational stores. As much as there is grown for key-value, graph, streaming, document, and other styles of data stores, we still use relational databases for many tasks. I don’t see that going away anytime soon, especially for legacy software that will continue to live for some time.

There is also the aspect of a DBA that involves the cleaning, checking, and verifying that data is in the form and format we expect, not to mention the need to ensure the data is intact and protected, and not changed inappropriately (or corrupt). Every system needs people that can dig through data and help decode its meaning as well as ensuring that business users can get it in to a report of some sort. Those tasks don’t go away. While end users might have more self-service query tools, that doesn’t ensure that they will actually know where the data is or how to reformat it. No end user tool is going to fix mm/dd/yyyy for a user expecting dd/mm/yyyy.

There is also the need to just manage large amounts of data. I know data scientists have struggled to work with large scales of data in the past, and not just because of hardware limitations. They spend an inordinate amount of time gathering and organizing data that is used for analysis or AI/ML operations. Future organizations won’t want to waste their time on those tasks and turn to some sort of DBA to help manage the large data needs of those people performing high level analysis.

The DBA isn’t going away, though the job is changing. Checking logs and backups is likely something you’ll do less of in the future if you work in Operations. Instead, you’ll manage more data, and you’ll certainly need some coding skills to ensure you can perform in GitOps environments, where we don’t click on things, but rather use code to define our systems and the configuration that we expect.

The evolution can be daunting, but it can also be exciting. You have time to learn and change and build new skills. Embrace the opportunity to grow and change in your career as a DBA.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

Building a career is hard work. It takes time and focus to move along a path that you choose for yourself. What I have seen across a few decades of work is that most people don’t bother to find a path, and are happy to wander from job to job, finding new positions or projects when they are forced to do so. As much as I advocate for others to continually learn, there’s nothing wrong with wandering randomly through a career, sticking with a job or employer as long as you can.

The one thought that I’d like to see everyone adopt is a conscious decision to do so. Make the choice to have the career you want, and the life you want, whatever that is for you.

Recently on Twitter, there has been a lot of career advice that I’ve seen posted. One very interesting item was that a developer shouldn’t compare themselves to anyone else. They should be proud of what they’ve done and work towards the goals and achievements that mean the most to them. Good advice, but often hard to follow.

Most of us only see a fraction of the world, and a limited view of potential opportunities for languages, projects, positions, and skills. We often do look at others’ accomplishments and then try to model ourselves in some way to be like others. Not completely but we may choose to learn a skill another has, or pass a test that someone else completed, or maybe go work for the company that a colleague has enjoyed. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Think about what others do and decide what aspects of that you’d like to adopt. As much as I’ve coached others to think for themselves, make their own decisions, and be proud of the things they accomplish, I also want them striving forward. That often requires a goal and an ideal, which we often find in others we admire. Compare yourself to others, but don’t judge yourself by their standards. Decide on your own if you’re living up to the measurements that make sense to you.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

Most of us try our best to do the best job they can each day at work. We never try to make mistakes. We might be lazy at times, or avoid some work, but we don’t try to do anything incorrectly. We might shortcut something, hoping a partial completion or quick patch is enough to satisfy a requirement, but we don’t actively do things incorrectly.

At least I hope that’s the case for all of you. I assume there are some BOFH people out there, but they are few and far between.

That being said, we’re human. We will have accidents, we’ll do something without thinking, or we’ll click (or type) the wrong item. Sometimes these errors go unnoticed until we can correct them. Perhaps they go unnoticed for years, and we completely forget about them.

Other little “whoops” mistakes have widespread consequences. I’ve seen incorrect firewall rules deployed that took down entire swaths of a business. There are incorrect deployments by developers, putting out old, or even future, code that breaks things down. DBAs might change, or even truncate, the wrong data at times. That’s something I’ve certainly been guilty of in the past.

In your job, are there mistakes you make that are forgivable? I’d hope that most are, and you don’t worry about certain tasks affecting your employment status. I’m sure there are potential mistakes that might require termination, but I’d hope these are repeated mistakes and not one time events.

Let us know today what mistakes might be forgivable in your organization. These might not be something you’ve done, but perhaps something you’ve witnessed. How much mercy does your management have for the humans trying to manage their database systems?

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.