Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • The Soft Skill of Respect

    When I started to work more closely with the product development teams at Redgate Software, I found it interesting that we devoted so many resources to user experience, testing, and other non-development tasks. Coming from more focused groups, this was new to me. At times this felt like an indulgence, and at times a lot of overhead that slowed down the coding process. Over time, I’ve grown to appreciate having different skills in our teams.

    Not that we build software in the best way possible, and certainly not the quickest, but we have some well coordinated and knowledgeable teams. We’re still evolving and learning how to put together teams of people and effectively build software, but I think we’re moving in the right directions.

    As soon as I read this piece on hard and soft skills, I thought of Redgate and all the non-coding people that build our products. What struck me was how often I’d devalued non technical skills, but the more I work with our (and other) software, the more I appreciate that those other roles are important. The piece rambles and wanders around the point, but I do see that there are a couple important takeaways I get from this.

    First, we need to respect others that perform different work from us if we are going to build synergy in our teams. The synergy is creating something that none of us could do individually, or even separately. We get more done by working together and that means we must be a team. Teams only come from respect between individuals, and that includes the managers.

    The second thing that I realized, is that it is important to understand a basic level of what other jobs entail. Too often we data professionals have been upset that application developers don’t know more SQL. Many of us learn some of the domain specific knowledge of the data we deal with, in order to talk with customers, produce reports, etc. Following our own advice, we ought to know more about the development platforms, the challenges, their testability, and more, if for no other reason than we can better understand how the entire system works and can talk about it with others

    I certainly know that relationships and people are incredibly important in larger projects, which is another important takeaway from the article. We all do need to improve our hard skills, learning to code more efficiently and securely. We also need to remember the importance of softer skills, and the need for a wider variety of skills in our teams. A little appreciation for the need for more than expert level coders might help us create better teams that function more efficiently and help us produce better software.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.8MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • Pausing the Learning for March

    In my last update, I was disappointed with my February progress. Busy with life and work, I didn’t do much reading or practicing. The latter is really the important part.

    I started March thinking I’d do a bit more, but I realize that won’t happen. I tried a little over the weekend, but with coaching responsibilities and family items, I just couldn’t really focus.

    March is a busy month for me outside of work. I have 3 major weekend volleyball tournaments with my daughter and my team, some travel for work, and still family commitments. In addition, I’ve started authoring a course with Packt, so my nights will be busy.

    As a result, I’m going to pause learning for March. Once I get past a few of these deadlines, I’ll go ahead and start reading again. For now, March will be heads down with SQL Server 2019.

  • Practical Web Scraping–More Reading

    As part of my learning goals for 2018, I wanted to work through various books. This is part of  my work with Python.

    It’s the end of the month, and I’m behind. I know it’s a short month, but it’s not that short. I had time to read the last couple week and I did some reading, but I didn’t get much practice.

    First the positive, then the excuses.

    Reading

    I did manage to read through the basic tutorial in Part I for how to use he BeautifulSoup module to read through an http page. This provided more ideas for finding sections of code and extracting out sections.

    I started Part II, which talks about more in depth http, with forms and posting. I’m still inside that one, and as of this point, I’m only 30% through the book.

    The plan for this weekend is to stop and practice a bit from BeautifulSoup and see what I can accomplish by reading a few web pages.

    Life Gets in the Way

    This month I had two long events on weekends that ate into my reading/working time, as well as a work project. I’m in the middle of volleyball season, and February brought me two 3 day tournaments to coach or watch. One was coaching a 13 year old team, and that occupied a lot of time. The evenings were spent with other coaches and I didn’t bring a laptop because I knew time would be limited. Add to that the need to get a few things done before and after the trip and I couldn’t practice web scraping.

    The second trip was for my daughter, and apart from watching her, my wife was in charge of team activities and I had to help. I had my laptop, but again, no time. I also chose to enjoy some time with my wife in the evening, which was worth it.

    Work was busy. We’re trying to migrate SQLServerCentral to a new platform and I’ve had to test things, as well as try and get other work done. As a result, I’ve been busy during the week and couldn’t even make time to incorporate any web scraping into my job. I also had to get other work done, so it’s been too busy to do much learning.

  • A Good Benefit?

    I’m wondering what you think. Is the idea of trading some paid time off (PTO) for student loan debt relief a good idea? That’s what Unum, an insurance company, is offering. They give their employees 28 days off, which is quite generous. I don’t know many people that get than many days off. If employees wish, they can trade up to 5 days for the equivalent salary, which is used to give them money for their student loans, or their children’s.

    It’s a creative offer, and one that doesn’t force people to forego vacation, as they’d still have more than four weeks of time to take off. In the US, most people don’t take their entire vacation allowance when it’s over two weeks. This gives them a chance to pay down some debt with minimal impact on their work life balance. At least, minimal for me. I struggle to take my 25 days, so this is a trade I’d make.

    The downside, to me, is that there may be plenty of employees that don’t have student loan debt. They don’t get a choice here, which feels unfair. I’d much rather the company offer employees the chance to sell back up to five days and use that payment for anything. After all, plenty of people have debt that isn’t related to education. Why not give them a chance to reduce other obligations?

    I am not quite sure of what I think of companies becoming more involved in employee’s personal lives. We are in a more freelance, gig economy where people change jobs regularly and often may work remotely. For me, I tend to favor the approach from Basecamp where the company treats people fairly and create an environment where employees are respected and want to work for a long time. While I know this is hard for many companies, and certainly hard to change, I do think more organizations could improve their culture and treatment of employees.

    I’m very lucky in that I work for a company that’s amazing. Redgate Software is the kind of company I’d want to create if I built another organization, and I have a fantastic set of co-workers, managers, and benefits. We are growing and hire here and there, and if you’re interested, I can’t recommend this organization enough.

    Can you say the same thing about your employer?

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.4MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.