Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • T-SQL Tuesday #109–Influence

    tsqltuesdayThis month’s T-SQL Tuesday host is Jason Brimhall. He asks everyone to write about influence, which is something that I should know about and think I have, but am somewhat uncomfortable writing about.

    That being said, here’s my entry this month.

    Influencing Others

    One of the motivations behind creating SQLServerCentral was to educate and help others. Our goal (Andy, Brian, myself) was to try and find ways that we’d had success, solved problems, or handled challenges and share that with others by writing articles, answering questions, and creating questions for our Question of the Day quiz.

    Across the years as I’ve done that, and I’ve written many editorials, there have been plenty of occasions to meet members of the SQLServerCentral community. Many of them have thanked me or talked about how the site and community made a difference in their careers, which is something I’m quite proud of. Helping others is a form or volunteerism and service, and while this is a vocation for me, it’s also a passion.

    One of the things I think that I’m most proud of us influencing others to also give back and share. I can only do so much, but if I can also convince others to share their knowledge, there is a level of helping and sharing that grows exponentially to everyone in our #SQLFamily. To that end, I have two stories.

    One is about blogging, which I tend to do regularly. I had a friend, someone I met years ago that wanted to start blogging and asked me for some hints and idea. I shared a few things that help me, but also challenged this individual to set a goal for writing. They did, and years later, they have quite a blog. Many of you have heard of this person, but I won’t mention the name here. That’s not important. What is important is they have helped many others and continue to do so today.

    The other story is a person I met at a user group meeting. I was giving a presentation and this individual had some intelligent questions to ask. Over a few meetings, as I talked with this person, I realized they were someone with a lot of talent on the data platform and encouraged them to think about speaking. I did this regularly, and while it took over a year, this person now has spoken at many events, including the PASS Summit.

    It can be scary and intimidating to share knowledge with others publicly, but it is also immensely rewarding and a way of helping others walk the path you have already covered. Perhaps I’ll influence one of you reading today to share some of what you’ve learned with those hungry to learn.

  • Automation at Work

    I do worry about the future of work for large sections of people. When I read pieces like this one in the Atlantic on automation, there are two things that come to mind. First, we are mindlessly sticking with 19th century models of work in many cases. Second, there are opportunities that could dramatically utilize the leverage of computing power to reduce our need for humans in many cases.

    Far too often I’ve seen processes and procedures in place that exist strictly because of historical precedence. We developed some way of working, likely because of expediency. We needed something done, so we found a way for a human to do it. We continue to do it that way, often because of a factory mentality. We don’t trust workers, who come and go, to handle the process correctly, so we specify a way of doing things that we know works. Even if it doesn’t work well.

    What’s amazing to me is that many of us still do this in technological jobs. I find lots of DBAs and infrastructure people that still do an amazing amount of manual work to check logs, jobs, backups, etc. They avoid automation for a variety of reasons, but often because of laziness and fear. They don’t want to think and put time into changing a process, both avoiding coding as well as asking permission. They also fear for their jobs, as shown in the article. Automate too much and maybe the company will replace you with a less skilled, far cheaper worker.

    Perhaps I’m an outlier, but this has never been something I’ve seen in my career. When I automate things and free up time at work, I don’t sit and browse Reddit play chess, as a few profiles from the article show. Instead, I’m more like Gary. I look for, and find, ways to improve other aspects of the company. I help others. I provide more “value” for my salary. This has worked well, even in companies that had a culture of “just do your job.”. There are always a few managers that want thinkers and doers, not just people that mindlessly move through each day.

    Automation is coming, more and more every day. As I look at the evolution of the data platform from Microsoft, the growth and capabilities of cloud services, and even the amazing third party products that free up our time, I know that the bar is constantly raising for the skills we require. What we might have expected only senior level people to do in 1999, we expect juniors to know now. Not everywhere, and certainly plenty of older management is stuck with their historical views of “just do this job,” but times are changing if you seek a new employer.

    I want to see more scripting, more PowerShell, more Bash scripts, more DevOps pipelines, more systems doing tedious work. That’s because many of our scripts and our flows are still rudimentary. They’re basic, expecting the happy paths to work, with limited testing and error handling. Instead, I’d like to automate myself out of work, but then find ways to better script more robust processes, with ways that double check my code is working, and alert me when it’s not. With new responses that are more intelligent than  a simple IF..THEN statement.

    We have lots of room to improve in how we structure systems and code, whether in application development or infrastructure management. Hopefully we’ll all start to embrace more automation, and look for new opportunities rather than being fearful of change.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.8MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

     

  • Lax Security is Harmful for Employment

    Manure rolls downhill Since I live on a horse ranch with some slight hills, I can attest this to be true. At least, it’s true for horses and it’s true for short distances. Manure isn’t very friction free and often ceases movement quickly. The same isn’t likely true for bull droppings, but I haven’t done much testing in that area.

    Most of us would agree that those that are negligent in their jobs, especially with regard to security, ought to be punished. In some cases, this should lead to termination, though I think many of us technical people would prefer that management who doesn’t budget resources for security be the ones punished.

    I mentioned manure rolls downhill, and this article on the after effects of data breaches bears that out. Not only were there record numbers of issues last year, but the typical cost is nearly $4million. That’s likely some very expensive breaches and lots of relatively inexpensive ones, but even the low cost ones probably feel expensive to small companies that experience them. In the lists of breaches I’ve seen, lots of smaller firms (retail, law, etc.) are included, and tens of thousands of dollars might be expensive for them.

    One thing that article points out, there are an increasing number of C-level executives being terminated after breaches. I’d like to think that’s good, but I’m somewhat pessimistic that the next hire will find ways to improve security. There are lots of impediments to fundamental change in more organizations, so I suspect this trend leads more to short term employment for CIOs and others, and likely higher demands for salaries because of the risk of security issues inside the company. The further puts pressure on budgets, which is another impediment to better security.

    Note that it’s not just IT execs, but non-IT staff as well. Maybe I’ll be wrong and this will make a difference. Of course, IT staff are let go as well, often blamed for issues. There will always be some security issues, but I urge those of you with privileged accounts and access to sensitive data to be careful with your credentials and work to improve security when you see issues. Get written documentation when someone doesn’t allow security changes, in addition to noting your requests. This might not stop a data breach, but perhaps it will give you a better chance of not being blamed for security incidents.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.0MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • Building Better Training Opportunities

    Recently I wrote a piece about some advice on quitting over training budgets, or the lack thereof. It had some interesting comments, but one stood out to me because it’s something I’ve heard and seen before. One of the readers noted that their company had bought a subscription for employees to learn new skills, but few of them had taken advantage of the courses.

    I’m not surprised. Many people are tired at the end of the day. Many people are fairly satisfied with their jobs. They’re not great, but not horrible, and we enjoy solving problems most days. Most of us would like to continue working where we are, in a stable situation. Not all of us, but many of us want to go to work and get paid for doing so, without a lot of motivation to do more.

    That’s fine, and I understand the pressures and stresses from the rest of life that weigh you down. I do understand that there are times that most of us would like to get away from work when we can and enjoy time with family, hobbies, faith, and more. My advice is that those things are important, but so is your career. Make some time to improve and grow your career and skills, even if you plan to stick with your current job. You never know when things will change.

    With that in mind, I think buying a subscription to Pluralsight or some other training option without providing any motivation or incentive is a poor plan. There needs to be some goals or expectations, and hopefully some sharing of the learning experience.

    If you need motivation, or you want to motivate co-workers, what about a competition? Challenge each other to complete a module of a course and write some code. Whether that’s to script installs with Chef, create a CI pipeline, count words with Python, or write faster T-SQL, if you have a goal, you’ll do better. I’ve had companies where we scheduled group watching of training, and with a small competition at the end, we found more people to be engaged and active in their learning.

    You could even make this a part of the review process, though please don’t just make this a checkbox. Ensure that if you want employees to learn something, you ask that they complete a class and contribute something back. Teach others, build something useful, or benefit the organization in some way.

    When there is a little more motivation, there’s a little more effort, and that can go a long way towards improving the skills of your workforce.

    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.