Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Done is Better than Good

    Mary Spender is a musician in the UK who I follow and hope to see live one day. She works hard producing content about music, that business, and, of course, songs. Recently she had a little essay on Instagram where talked about creative time and focus. In it she referenced Elizabeth Gilbert saying “done is better than good.”

    My initial reaction was “that’s right.”

    Then I thought about software, and poor queries impacting database performance, and thought, “No, that’s not right.” My next reaction was to think maybe it’s “done is better than great”. I do see plenty of engineers trying to build great software. Code that would impress their peers or their former professors. Or maybe their future self.

    Then I thought, no, Elizabeth is right. If things don’t get done, then what’s the point?

    At the same time, I think that “done” and “good” (or great) aren’t mutually exclusive. We can get things done and make them great, which is something to strive for. We can also get good things done.

    Sometimes.

    Sometimes we don’t have that luxury of time, for various reasons. If I had to make a trade, I push for good (or quality) as much as possible if the delay isn’t substantial. If it is, then done is likely the choice I’d make. I do try to return and refactor, improve, etc. to raise the quality over time, but I recognize that sometimes getting something done is important. Certainly, on the ranch, I need to fix things to get by, with the aim of doing a better job later. I have mixed success at returning to improve a patch with a better fix later, but so far, that’s worked well. I’d say the same thing has happened while building software or managing systems, with enough success to be comfortable with my choices.

    What about you? What choices have you had to make about being done over delivering something that’s good? Or maybe great.

    Steve Jones

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

    Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.

  • Internal Staff Growth

    Imagine that you are about to tackle a new project that will take more than a year. This might be a new system, perhaps a cloud migration, or maybe it’s rewriting something that doesn’t work well. You don’t have enough employees to undertake the project without overloading everyone. Your team needs to grow.

    Would you rather hire a more senior person from outside the organization or pick a junior person that’s already inside your company and teach them what they need to know? Think about this as if you were the one making the decision about the future direction of your software team. Philosophically, do you want to buy experienced people or train/build new ones from your internal staff.

    It’s an interesting idea and for a lot of companies, I see them looking outside the company first, rather than investing in, and training, their internal staffers to grow. It takes time to train and grow people, for sure, and it’s a constant investment that never goes away. At the same time, bringing people in from the outside also requires some level of training on how the current systems and org work, even if the new hire has a lot of experience.

    I think there are good reasons to look at both of these, but my view is that I want to have people on a team that know how to work together. The tech skills (or design, modeling, etc.) can be taught, and I would rather have a good cultural fit, already knowing how a person fits with others. That assumes I’ve got good employees who fit together and believe in our culture. That’s hard enough to do, which is why I want to hire people who can work as a team and keep them. Part of the “keeping” them is investing in them.

    This also means that if people don’t fit in, I want to help them move on to a better fit.

    This doesn’t mean I want everyone to think the same. It is important to have a variety of views on how to design and build applications. A variety of people is important, but we have to be a team.

    I prefer to train and invest in the people I have over bringing in more experienced staffers. A big part of why I feel this way is that hiring is always a gamble, and it seems we make no shortage of mistakes. If I do get it right, then I want to grow and keep those people around for the long term.

    Steve Jones

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

    Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.

  • Back at Small Data SF in 2025

    Today I’m in San Francisco at Small Data SF 2025. I went to the conference last year and thought it was a great event. Watching people talk about data and how we might look at managing smaller systems, at dealing with the challenges of exploding volumes by querying, storing, and handling less data was fascinating. The event had me me really thinking about ways in which we can build better performing (and cheaper) systems.

    To be clear, small data isn’t very little data. Often this is still 100s of GB, perhaps low TBs, but it’s getting away from the idea of thinking we’ll be working on PB-sized big data systems, or that we even need to.

    Last year there were lots of talks on data analysis, querying, and even AI, but using smaller sets of data in practical ways that provide value to organizations and individuals by judiciously choosing data sets. Either recent or representative data.

    This helped me think of new ways for subsetting, which is something I’ve been pushing at Redgate for our TDM product.

    I’m looking forward to the talks. This is a quick trip. I skipped the workshops yesterday since they weren’t that great last year (too many product/company pitches from Silicon Valley) and flew out last night after coaching kids in their first practice. At the conference today listening to talks and doing networking get together after before flying back early tomorrow.

    A quick trip, but I’m sure I’ll lots to write about (and think about) in the future.

  • Can/Can’t Do/Don’t

    The other day, I asked my daughter if she wanted me to make her some eggs. She responded with a “Yes!” in text and came to sit up at the counter while I cooked for us both. We chatted a bit, and at one point she said, “Thanks for cooking, but it’s not that I can’t cook.”

    I laughed a bit and responded with “this isn’t a can/can’t situation, it’s a do/don’t or will/won’t one.” I know my girl can cook; I made sure all my kids learned how to cook. It’s that they often choose not to, hunting for leftovers, going for takeout, or skipping meals.

    I’ve never been one who likes to hear “can’t” from anyone. Even today, when I coach kids and one say “I can’t do that,” my response is “yet. You can’t yet.”

    It’s easy to think that because you don’t know how to do something, or don’t have confidence, or you’ve not done it well (or right) in the past, that you can’t do it now. That could be true, but often I find people default to “can’t” when they really mean they don’t want to do something or won’t do something. Easy to confuse those, and easy to brainwash yourself when using the wrong words too often.

    There are things I can’t do. For example, I can’t run a 10.0s 100m dash. I can’t dunk a basketball, though there was a time I could. However, on the ranch or at work, I rarely find that I can’t do something if I apply myself with a little curiosity, effort, and experimentation. I can learn most things and do them well enough to meet a goal. Someone else might do them better, but I can learndo them.

    I see too few people in the world who aren’t curious at work, aren’t willing to put in extra effort to get a task completed, or don’t feel an urge to tackle tasks outside of their comfort zone. I see fewer people dedicated to making an effort to learn outside of work time, whether on their own or at an event like a SQL Saturday.

    Most of the people I see succeed and thrive in jobs aren’t smarter than others. They just do the work. And if they don’t know something, they teach themselves what they need in order to get the job done. They drive themselves forward.

    Life is hard, but it gets easier when you want to put in effort to make it better.

    Steve Jones

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

    Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.