Tag: career

Throughout my career, I’ve primarily been a full time employee for an organization. I have worked for myself, as well as for consulting companies. For the latter, I’ve been an employee as well as a contract worker. There’s a bit of difference between those, at least in the US, and it isn’t always easy to understand what that means for an individual.

I thought about my various experiences while reading about Jon Shaulis’ T-SQL Tuesday post recently on changing his mind about contracting. He also has a section on T-SQL (bonus points for Jon), but the post is mostly about contracting and employment. Jon talks about some of the differences he’s seen between working for someone as a contractor and as an employee. His experiences are similar to mine, but I certainly wish I’d had a good list of these things when considering job offers in my 20s.

There are lots of people in our #sqlfamily that have started consulting businesses, wanting to work for themselves and make more money. You can read various accounts of how well this works, but it certainly isn’t as smooth for everyone as it might seem. I like reading Brent Ozar’s yearly evaluations, and I’ve been following Eugene Meidinger’s journey as well. These aren’t about contracting too much, but they do give you an idea of what it’s  like to operate your own business, and as a contractor, you are your own business, though you have a little less of the “business” stuff to do since someone does the admin, selling, and marketing and just tells you what to do.

I actually encourage everyone to consider themselves and contractor and don’t get too complacent with your job as an employee. You never know when you situation will change, and it’s good to be prepared. It might not even be you, as your spouse or partner might force you to make a change.

Or your employer might.

Just like a contractor might have one client for 10 years, I think it’s prudent to keep an eye on the environment and be prepared to find another client if some unforeseen event occurs. The days of single company employment for life are over for most of us. I have the best job, but I keep an eye on the market. One never knows when things might change for them.

Deciding how to structure your employment is a decision each of us should make, but do so with an open mind and some understanding of the changes for work, benefits, savings, medical coverage, and more. While Jon has a good list, I’d love to see more people build and publish a structured checklist in terms of decisions and costs, even sample ones. This can help others get an idea of what the impact might be on their life when making a decision like this.

No matter whether you choose to work for an organization or as a contractor, it’s not a final decision. You can change your mind anytime, though do so with some planning and consideration of the impact on you and your family. It’s not an easy decision, but you should be comfortable with your choice when you finally do make it.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

Not too long ago, I had a sales engineer contact me about a script that a customer needed. It was similar to others we have for various Redgate tools, but also different enough that the customer needed help. In fact, I also needed some help.

I asked a question on Twitter, mostly because I was busy and wanted to know if someone had solved the (partial) problem that I had. I got a number of responses, none of which were direct solutions, but many of them contained some hints. At the time, I filed these away because I didn’t have time to work on anything, but I knew that asking the question gave me a few starting places.

A day later, I started to experiment, but ran into a few issues. The PoSh script wasn’t doing what I expected, which is always frustrating. I almost started to ask questions, but then I decided to work through the process. After all, I’d already interrupted friends on Twitter with my original question, and I ought to experiment a bit before I asked others to do my work for me.

This was a script designed to find the latest files and build a restore. My first problem was that no data came back from the backup set. I double-checked my data, but didn’t see anything. I then set a variable for the parameter and another to get results. I started to get some information, which led me to review my work again. I realized I’d mis-typed something as a direct parameter, but had corrected it in the variable assignment. First lesson, really proofread carefully.

The data I first got back didn’t quite make sense, so ran this through Get-Member. I didn’t find any property that looks like what I wanted, at least not intuitively. Rather than ask or post a question, I started just checking properties. Eventually I realized the data was there, but not under the name I’d have used or expected. Sometimes just digging through the properties and methods is the best way to learn.

Lastly, with a bunch of data in my object, I needed the top 1 item. Stack Overflow helped point me in the right direction, and I solved my own issue by reading a few different things people had done. With a little research and experimentation, started off by a few questions of others, I had a script that I could give to a customer.

While our management might expect us to know everything about our jobs, often they know this isn’t the case. Technology and platforms change quickly and expand widely to the point that few of us know everything about anything. What management and others really expect is that we can learn to solve our own problems, with some help from others, but also some ability to learn and experiment.

At SQLServerCentral, we have great forums for SQL Server questions. Stack Overflow is a great spot for lots of general technology queries. Plenty of people are willing to help, but often with some sketch of a solution, expecting you to do some work to mock a scenario and then take answer and adapt them to your environment.

There are lots of people in the world willing to help you, but they don’t want to do your job. Ask questions when you don’t know, but also plan to spend your own time experimenting and learning about how and why an answer might work. Before you post a followup question, be sure you experiment and see what you can teach yourself. You will likely learn something and maybe next time you’ll be the one answering a question for someone else.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.

Every winter my wife flirts with the idea of returning to a corporate job and making more money. Winter is a slow time for horse training, and she gets bored and antsy. Horse training is physically hard, and as we talked about it last year, I said she should continue with horses for a few more years and then go back to a career later if she wanted.

Her response was that it would be much harder at 60 than 50. Perhaps, but I think her success in the business world and a strong set of skills wouldn’t much matter, but I did get her point. I’ve had a few other people express similar concerns.

I had a good friend that spent most of his career in IT. He left the military and found a job with a large telecommunications company in Denver. He worked there for decades, raising three kids similar in age to my own. We chatted often at Scouts about life, technology, and kids. He was laid off a few years back, and as someone trying to find a new job in technology over the age of 50, he struggled to even get interviews. He spent a couple years looking and then mostly gave up, moving to other types of work at a much lower pay.

I wonder how many of you worry about employment as you get older. I know early in my career, it was the graybeards that were the most respected in the mainframe world. At some point, we started to look to the young hot shots working on PCs as the most respected technologists. I think we often look for younger, but not necessary young people when we hire. In fact, I spoke with someone recently that struggled to not discriminate against older people when they learned about ailments that a person might have.

I read some great thoughts from Dr. Greg Low that got me thinking about this. After all, I’m getting older, and much closer to the end of my career than the beginning. I think that I’m more willing to learn than most. I preach this to many of you, the idea that we need to keep learning. I’m very lucky that I have a job that encourages and allows me to learn on a regular basis.

I do think there is some ageism in the technology field. I also think there is a lot of pressure to reduce costs, so if you’re not providing a a lot of value as a worker, why not replace you with a cheaper individual that can do the same job? At least, plenty of management thinks that way. I also think lots of hiring people that are younger think that health and stamina are lower and older people (or women) and feel they can’t keep up.

The cloud and automation are changing the way more and more us approach our jobs. We need to have strong soft skills, in addition to technological ones, and we need to prove we can solve problems, not perform tasks by rote. Those simple things are getting automated in more and more places. While I don’t think we’ll get to the point that we dramatically automate away most jobs, DBA or developer, but the bar for skill and talent is being raised, especially when you look for  a new job, so ensure you’re regularly raising your bar.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher or iTunes.