Tag: career

We tend to work a lot of hours as data professionals, developers, even IT management. It seems that we often are in the office at night, on weekends, and anytime there is a crisis. Even when we don’t have down systems, it seems the pressure to continue to build new features, functions, and ensure systems are operating well leads many of us to work longer hours than the expected 40 hour week. In fact, there are no shortage of companies that expect IT employees to work more than 40 hours every week.

This isn’t limited to IT. Doctors, lawyers, and plenty of other professions put in extra hours at work. Even teachers often do work at home. I’ve seen this first hand this past year with my oldest son teaching 5th grade. He spends a fair amount of time doing work at the kitchen counter, not unlike what I used to do when I worked as a DBA in a few companies.

I have an amazing job. Along with Grant, Kathi, and Kendra, we all have good positions. We work for an amazing employer, Redgate Software, and we get to travel around, speaking at various events and meeting lots of you in the SQL Server community. We also all work from home, which is becoming more common, but it still a luxury for many. In the era of double, or triple, digits of minutes to commute to an office, that’s a blessing.

Recently, I saw this note from Kendra, and I get it. I’ve been there and I have a tendency to work too much. I like my job, and I’ve enjoyed both being a DBA and Developer, as well as running SQLServerCentral. I enjoyed it so much that there were a number of years where I struggled to take much vacation, much to the dismay of my wife. Even while on vacation, I’d be checking email and the status of the site. Early on, I was afraid to take any time away from this site, scheduling time to log on, answer a few questions, write an editorial, and even edit a submission on weekends and during vacations.

I got better over time, balancing out work, though a few years ago, I was where Kendra is now. I had made too many commitments and really, too much travel.  I’ve felt what Andy described here, feeling tired and short tempered. I re-read some of my own thoughts and eventually talked with my manager. I scaled back travel, found a new hobby coaching, and I’ve felt much more balanced across the last year. Life is still chaotic, but it’s a variety of things I enjoy. Plus, I still have trouble sitting still for more than a few days.

Working hard feels good. There’s a sense of accomplishment from completing tasks and solving problems. Many of us enjoy this, but it’s easy to become unbalanced with work and life. It’s also easy to allow your boss to overwork you when we feel pressure to stay employed. Those are hard situations in which to find yourself, and I can only advise you that you can push back to find some balance. Most bosses, even bad ones, don’t want to fire people. It’s disruptive, expensive, and makes a bad situation even worse.

Remember, we work to live, not the other way around. Keep that advise close by in times of stress and learn to take time off, enjoy time with friends and families, and ensure you have something outside of work in which you can sink some passionate time.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn.

There’s a meme of sorts going around Twitter. It asks for your non-tech jobs, and I’ve seen some good ones from Grant, Kendra, Erin Stellato, and more. There are some interesting ones, and a few that I’m glad I never had to try. My list is here:

1. Ice bag packer/delivery
2. Waiter/bartender
3. Lawn service supervisor
4. Lay water/sewer pipe
5. Volleyball coach (current)

In my youth, I had a few more (newspaper delivery, painter), but I’ve had paying computer jobs since I was about 16, off and on, and I had a lot of restaurant jobs. I’ve actually been a cook, busboy, delivery person, waiter, bartender, and manager. I always enjoyed restaurant work and even had some part time jobs even as I was starting my career in tech. These days I certainly have ranch jobs, usually assigned by my wife, and I do coach competitive youth volleyball over the winter.

I know most of us have more in our lives than tech, and some of us might even have second jobs now, whether by necessity or for fun. This week I’m curious what other jobs you’ve held and which ones you enjoyed. Perhaps there were some you hated. Let us know how rounded your work history is.

As I get older, I think about other jobs. Not that I want to leave Redgate or SQLServerCentral, but I’d like to retire at some point and still have something that occupies some time. Volunteering somewhere, with a commitment as a real job, is something I hope to do at some point. Volleyball is great, but one thing I’m looking to try is holding babies at the local hospital. Many of them need companionship when they are born premature or ill and parents need a break. Seems like a good gig to me.

What interesting job would you try in retirement?

BTW, I know some of you worry about these as a security question, but I’ve never seen this listed as one of my choices. If you have, then please don’t answer.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn

I recently installed Microsoft Teams. Not because I wanted to, or because Redgate is abandoning Slack, but because Microsoft requires it for some MVP calls. This replaces Skype for Business (S4B), and while it worked OK, I’m not sure it worked better. In fact, for the use cases I have, Teams feels like an abandonment of the Skype codebase for a newer version of the same thing. That’s fine, and I don’t really care. It’s slightly annoying as I have S4B for internal stuff at Redgate and didn’t need another tool, but with a modern, quad core, 2.xGHz CPU and 32GB of RAM, one more application isn’t going to break anything. It is, however, making me less productive.

We have lots of ways to communicate. In fact, I have Twitter (social media), Slack (work comms), Outlook (email), S4B (calls) and a mobile phone all running as I write this. I don’t get too caught up in any of them, and I have most notifications disabled, precisely for the reasons outlined in this article: the tools can be a productivity drain. I know this, and most of these tools actually live in the background, behind the various tools I use to get work done. I check them at times, but try to stay off most of the day. I need to focus, and having more communication methods is distracting.

There was a day not too long ago when I needed to find a person that had missed a meeting time. Messages went out through Slack DMs, Twitter DMs, text, Skype IM, and email, hoping that a notification would pop up for someone on some app. I know I’ve used Slack like a PA system at times, pinging other people to go find someone that wasn’t responding to messages. For someone working remotely, it’s frustrating to try and reach out to others, but I’ve seen people in an office take the same tactic, reaching out electronically, which often creates more interruptions and distractions for others. I don’t know if this is that much worse than walking around an office and physically interrupting others, but I do think it can be more pervasive as too many of us have constant notifications on devices that don’t go away when the workday ends. We also do it more, because it’s so easy. Getting up to walk around is a bar that deters some people from interrupting others.

What might be even harder to deal with is the linkage of various applications together. Now I see GitHub messages in GitHub, Slack, and Email. It’s a barrage of items that aren’t hard to handle, but they each take away a little bit of time and attention.

That’s the downside of communication methods. Each requires a little time, even if just to click/swipe/eye roll at a notification. Those little bits of time add up and don’t necessarily help us be more productive. Some things require too much time as I’ve watched people look through and consider just the right emoji to use for a reaction on Slack. Most of the time I think there should just be a couple choices, because the richness of the variety equates to the decline of quality time spent on work that needs to be done.

We constantly hear that communication skills, those soft skills of relating to others and exchanging information clearly, are important. They are, but I think there is another element to communicating well: brevity. Learning to communicate effectively, in a way that allows you yo get your message across quickly, while also being able to focus for long periods of time is a skill more of us need. Being able to turn off distractions, or delay responses when quickness isn’t needed will help you be more productive and efficient. I think one of the interview questions I’d ask in the future would be around how to deal with the constant barrage of Slack/Teams/Skype/Outlook/Github/whatever-comes-next messages.

Do you know how to reduce the overload of communications in your job? Let us know today.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn

Out of town at the MVP Summit, so you get Bad Management.