Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • 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.

  • Choosing a Career

    This was a short week in the US with the Thanksgiving holiday. This is a time when many people in the US have a long holiday weekend and often get together with family for some time away from work. It’s also a tradition for many people to “give thanks” to the blessings and people in their life. It’s a good time to reflect and appreciate the things that go well for you.

    That doesn’t mean that many, or even most, of us aren’t looking to grow our careers. For some of us, that may mean moving into a new field. Is that a good decision? Will we like the day to day work? Those are tough questions, and while you might be enamored with some technology as a hobby, when you do the work every day, things aren’t always the same. I’ve certainly seen this with friends and colleagues that have dramatically changed the lives into a completely new field. What is fun a few hours a week may not be as interesting when it’s a 40-50 hour a week grind.

    At SQLServerCentral, we often see posts where a community member asks if they should learn x or y. Should they move into a new career, or what’s it like working as a person that does z? Those are good questions, and I ran across a nice blog post from Dev Nambi on what it’s like being a data scientist. If you’re interested in data science, this is a nice list of notes about his job, but even if you were thinking about becoming an HA specialist, or Power BI report writer, or something else, the post talks about things that make impressions with his job. I’d like to hear more about how others would answer some of these questions about their own work. I need to do some of this myself.

    There are also a few very good items that I wanted to highlight. First, Dev notes that you don’t learn everything in school and there is more to work than is learned in school. That being said, there are core concepts to understand. I think this is true in most fields. We need some good base knowledge, but there is more than that knowledge. We need to learn how to put concepts and requirements together, as well as continue to ask good probing questions about the task.

    The other item that is pointed out a few ways is teamwork. Communication skills, including body language and humor, are important. We are social creatures and while I think having a variety of skills, views, and ideas is important, we need to get along with each other. We need teamwork within an organization, but for our careers, we also need a team of people to help us. That’s our network. Those skills are important for all of us, no matter what the job.

    If you want to move into a new role and grow your career, you have options. You can use schooling, you can try to grow in your role, or you can learn things on your own and apply for new positions. They all work, but they all have some drawbacks as well. They also all require effort and motivation, so if you want to make a change, set some learning goals, and start working. Making strides in a direction will help you grow and get you closer to your goals.

    Steve Jones

  • The Data Scribe

    There’s an interesting piece in the New Yorker about technology in the medical field from Atul Gawande. It talks about the love hate relationship doctors have with medical systems, and ruminates a bit about whether these new systems are making medicine better or worse. I think Dr. Gawande is a very interesting individual, and whose Checklist Manifesto is a great look at improving processes.

    The article talks about the struggles of doctors with using various systems, but there is one interesting solution that some companies have tried: medical scribes. For these companies, rather than teach a doctor everything and have them do their own work and spend less time with a patient, the meetings are either recorded or witnessed by a scribe. The scribe handles the computer work, writing down observations, notes, orders, etc. The doctor later approves things, but this allows the doctor to focus more on patient care and get less caught up in technology.

    Years ago I worked in a company that had some extensive technology in some areas, but some older senior management. There were still secretaries that literally took dictation, handled schedules, and printed reports for the senior executives, who almost never used their computers. The might pull up some emails, but anything that required more than a few keystrokes was dictated to a secretary who wrote and sent the emails. At the time I thought this was wasteful, after all, couldn’t an executive type a few emails themselves?

    I thought of that experience while reading the other story about doctors. Certainly the executives could type emails, but not as well as others, and was that a good use of their time? Certainly today, with far too much communication being sent, I might argue executives ought to have less access to email, not more. Certainly upper level execs do have assistants, but is it really a good use of time for directors and managers to be dealing with many of our computer applications?

    What about report tools like Power BI and Tableau? Is that a good use of anyone’s time in finding data and assembling it into reports? The analysis is, but tracking down data, formatting it, and more feels like something that is a skill in and of itself.

    Perhaps we need data scribes in more industries. Not a single employee dedicated to one person, but a specialist in the gathering and cleaning of data, preparing it in tools that business people then use to perform their analysis, working for multiple people. Need more data? Ping your data scribe, someone that knows the structure, meaning, and location of data.

    Would you want that job? I know I’ve done this at times for people, finding the data they need and producing a report, often showing them how to do it themselves, but I wonder if that’s a good idea. With data changing, new sources appearing, stronger access controls and more, perhaps this is a role that more companies ought to embrace to ensure that those with experience analyzing data aren’t spending time fiddling with it.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 4.7MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.