Tag: career

One of the amazing things about the #sqlfamily is that we often help each other in a very giving way. Certainly other technical communities have lots of sharing and helping, though often with more of an RTFM attitude. I don’t know how well many other industries share information with each other, but the nature of being connected with technology through blogs, free events, #sqlhelp and more certainly seems to facilitate lots of sharing.

When SQL Saturday first started, Andy Warren and I worried that we would struggle to get speakers to donate time for a number of free events. The first year we had discussions about how to find speakers if we were to get 10 events scheduled in a year. That proved to be a non issue. It’s amazing to think that these days we have 6 or 7 events on a single date, and I’m looking forward to the time when there are actually 10 events on one Saturday.

Our speakers donate a lot of their own time and money to give back to others. In 2018, I’m particularly impressed by Kevin Feasel, who I was lucky enough to see at a number of events and even share a bus ride on a double decker in Cambridge. I’ve also met a number of volunteers and attendees who have had similar schedules during a year or two, where they have lots of excitement. What often happens is that after a few years, they scale back, some of them even giving up on all of their efforts.

It’s wonderful that people give back, but I do worry about sustainability, both for events and individuals. Andy Warren wrote recently about volunteer time and the load in life. I haven’t tracked my time, but I know that it sometimes is quite a load. While Redgate often covers my expenses, the time away from home to speak at events comes out of family time as I still need to work a normal week when I’m speaking on Saturday.

I do think it’s important to volunteer and give back to others. Help those getting started, those less fortunate, or those that are inspired to move forward in life. There’s a time and place for all of us, and I do hope all of you think about where and how you can help others, either in this field or in other ways. If not now, then at some point in the future.

Time is a valuable resource, and while I think Andy underestimates the amount spent on his endeavors, I think it’s good that after many years of helping others, he is trying to quantify the time spend and perhaps inspire some of you to think about where you might do the same. 50 hours a year is both a lot and a little. What are your plans for the coming year and could you spare 50 hours to help others? Leave a comment here, and let Andy know what you think of his plans.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.9MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

It’s the final Friday of the year, between the Christmas and New Year days off that many of us have as holidays. Since this is often a very quiet workday, I thought it would be a good day for many of us to stop and think about our future plans for next year.

I write often about career topics, encouraging you to improve your skill sets and actively manage your career. I think too many of us have been passive in our careers. We learn what our boss asks us to learn. We change jobs when we need to, often just accepting the first offer we get. We let ourselves be interviewed without interviewing the hiring organization. In most cases, we fall from position to position, which often might not be what we did if we actively managed our career.

I talk about the different things you can do to brand yourself, market yourself, and improve your career in various presentations and writings. However, before you brand yourself, you really need to know what skills and abilities you want to brand. For many of us, this means verifying, practicing, and improving the skills in areas we want to work. To do that, most of us need some sort of plan.

That’s what this piece is about. What is your plan for 2019? Are there things you want to learn for fun? For your current position? Maybe to set you up to get a new job in a year or two? Andy Warren has written a bit about this, and I think he has some good ideas. We need a plan that’s manageable, but also helps us move forward. We should write this down and have some way of measuring what we want to do with this plan. I’m asking you today to think a bit about what you might want to do and then make some plans.

I’ve tried a few ideas in the past, with various levels of success, and in 2019 I want to try something else. I like books and learn from them well, so I’m going to take a number of books that I bought from Apress during their $7 sale and start working through them. My goal is to get through a book a month in 2019, adding some skills and practicing some of the techniques to see if I can learn some useful skills in this way.

If you’re not busy today, work on a plan. Outline the time, the money, and the way in which you plan to learn in 2019 and write that down. If nothing else, maybe you want to go through one article we publish each week and practice some of those skills. You’d certainly learn quite a bit doing that in 2019.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.5MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

The last couple of years have seen the job title “full stack developer” posted quite often. With the popularity of DevOps, companies are hoping to hire a developer that can work on the database, understand some networking, and continue to build front end applications. In my career, I’ve done all of this while being just titled a programmer, but apparently with more specialization these days, some want to differentiate themselves as being able to do it all.

I saw this tweet from Erin Stellato, asking if people manage multiple items. Specifically, she asks about “the virtualization, the server admin, the storage, and system security”. No networking, firewalls, etc. in there, but I’ll add those in as well. This week, can you answer this question:

Are there any of you full-stack DBAs? 

By that I mean you work on more than the database. Do you manage storage at all? Are you a domain admin with AD responsibilities? Do you manage applications or perform some development? Is there any networking in your daily work?

I’ve actually done all of these before. At one startup, my primary responsibility was a database developer and administrator, but I had AD rights and needed to help our sysadmin with Exchange and various other servers. I setup and configured our T-1 line to the co-location facility, and explained how to get two NICs in our SQL Server working so that backups and office access didn’t interfere with application access from our web site. I even had to help build new network cables one day.

In a few jobs, I’ve actually been a domain admin, even though I was primarily a DBA. That was because we shared responsibilities and on-call on the team. Even though my primary work was with databases, I ended up helping work on other systems at times. To me, these were welcome distractions and also chances to build knowledge that was useful in troubleshooting and narrowing down the scope of problems.

Are any of you still doing that today? Whether you are or not, let us know what types of responsibilities you have at work.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 3.1MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.