Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Your Value from a Conference

    The PASS Data Community Summit 2025 was held in Seattle last month, and it was an interesting event for me. I wrote a wrap-up on my blog, but a few things stood out. The event was a little smaller, with over 50% first-time attendees, but seemed to be a bit more vibrant. Perhaps people coming for the first time added something that I hadn’t expected. I was a bit over-committed, so I didn’t spend a lot of time in the public spaces, but things felt a little different the few times I was in the expo hall or the hallway track.

    I ran across a Reddit thread on the value of conferences, and it got me thinking. What is the value that you get from attending a conference (or an event). If your employer pays you might feel that you should bring some value back to them when you return. That’s the premise of the thread, and I know there are plenty of people that feel that way. However.

    Should you value your time and effort any less?

    What if you attend a SQL Saturday or other local event for free? Shouldn’t there be some ROI for you? With that in mind, I’m asking the question of you: what value do you get from attending a conference? For any type, size, shape, topic, etc. conference, let us know what you do go, or would go, or maybe would choose to skip the opportunity.

    I’ve attended lots of different events in my career. My perspective varies depending on the event. I’ve attended customer conferences for a vendor, where I want to learn what might be changing, how others use the products, ask if there are solutions to our challenges, or even get the chance to influence the product development people. For local events, it’s networking and the chance to see a session on something I am interested in learning more about or a topic that might be of use in my job. For large industry events, there’s a larger scale, and more choices of topics, so I might get the chance to explore something I know little about or see some great speakers inspire me.

    However, I get out what I put into it. If I am passive and just sitting there hoping I learn something from a talk, I’m can be disappointed. That’s an expensive way to learn something. The real value comes when I ask questions of the speaker afterward (or listen to others’ questions). I learn more by discussing the talk with other attendees, or having random conversations about the things others are doing/learning/trying/etc. in the hallways. Engaging others gives me ideas and inspiration I don’t get from a lecture.

    The other thing that comes from a conference is a break from work. I try hard not to schedule work things or respond to messages while in sessions. I want to unwind, let my brain change gears, and hopefully get recharged in a different atmosphere. There’s also the chance to visit another city and perhaps see a sight or two. I love Las Vegas for this reason, taking my wife and seeing a show after networking and learning all day. It’s a great break from work.

    I think there are good reasons to send people to conferences: learning, getting inspired, recharging, or even as a perk for employees who are working hard the rest of the year.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

    Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.

  • Done is Better than Good

    Mary Spender is a musician in the UK who I follow and hope to see live one day. She works hard producing content about music, that business, and, of course, songs. Recently she had a little essay on Instagram where talked about creative time and focus. In it she referenced Elizabeth Gilbert saying “done is better than good.”

    My initial reaction was “that’s right.”

    Then I thought about software, and poor queries impacting database performance, and thought, “No, that’s not right.” My next reaction was to think maybe it’s “done is better than great”. I do see plenty of engineers trying to build great software. Code that would impress their peers or their former professors. Or maybe their future self.

    Then I thought, no, Elizabeth is right. If things don’t get done, then what’s the point?

    At the same time, I think that “done” and “good” (or great) aren’t mutually exclusive. We can get things done and make them great, which is something to strive for. We can also get good things done.

    Sometimes.

    Sometimes we don’t have that luxury of time, for various reasons. If I had to make a trade, I push for good (or quality) as much as possible if the delay isn’t substantial. If it is, then done is likely the choice I’d make. I do try to return and refactor, improve, etc. to raise the quality over time, but I recognize that sometimes getting something done is important. Certainly, on the ranch, I need to fix things to get by, with the aim of doing a better job later. I have mixed success at returning to improve a patch with a better fix later, but so far, that’s worked well. I’d say the same thing has happened while building software or managing systems, with enough success to be comfortable with my choices.

    What about you? What choices have you had to make about being done over delivering something that’s good? Or maybe great.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

    Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.

  • Internal Staff Growth

    Imagine that you are about to tackle a new project that will take more than a year. This might be a new system, perhaps a cloud migration, or maybe it’s rewriting something that doesn’t work well. You don’t have enough employees to undertake the project without overloading everyone. Your team needs to grow.

    Would you rather hire a more senior person from outside the organization or pick a junior person that’s already inside your company and teach them what they need to know? Think about this as if you were the one making the decision about the future direction of your software team. Philosophically, do you want to buy experienced people or train/build new ones from your internal staff.

    It’s an interesting idea and for a lot of companies, I see them looking outside the company first, rather than investing in, and training, their internal staffers to grow. It takes time to train and grow people, for sure, and it’s a constant investment that never goes away. At the same time, bringing people in from the outside also requires some level of training on how the current systems and org work, even if the new hire has a lot of experience.

    I think there are good reasons to look at both of these, but my view is that I want to have people on a team that know how to work together. The tech skills (or design, modeling, etc.) can be taught, and I would rather have a good cultural fit, already knowing how a person fits with others. That assumes I’ve got good employees who fit together and believe in our culture. That’s hard enough to do, which is why I want to hire people who can work as a team and keep them. Part of the “keeping” them is investing in them.

    This also means that if people don’t fit in, I want to help them move on to a better fit.

    This doesn’t mean I want everyone to think the same. It is important to have a variety of views on how to design and build applications. A variety of people is important, but we have to be a team.

    I prefer to train and invest in the people I have over bringing in more experienced staffers. A big part of why I feel this way is that hiring is always a gamble, and it seems we make no shortage of mistakes. If I do get it right, then I want to grow and keep those people around for the long term.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

    Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.

  • Back at Small Data SF in 2025

    Today I’m in San Francisco at Small Data SF 2025. I went to the conference last year and thought it was a great event. Watching people talk about data and how we might look at managing smaller systems, at dealing with the challenges of exploding volumes by querying, storing, and handling less data was fascinating. The event had me me really thinking about ways in which we can build better performing (and cheaper) systems.

    To be clear, small data isn’t very little data. Often this is still 100s of GB, perhaps low TBs, but it’s getting away from the idea of thinking we’ll be working on PB-sized big data systems, or that we even need to.

    Last year there were lots of talks on data analysis, querying, and even AI, but using smaller sets of data in practical ways that provide value to organizations and individuals by judiciously choosing data sets. Either recent or representative data.

    This helped me think of new ways for subsetting, which is something I’ve been pushing at Redgate for our TDM product.

    I’m looking forward to the talks. This is a quick trip. I skipped the workshops yesterday since they weren’t that great last year (too many product/company pitches from Silicon Valley) and flew out last night after coaching kids in their first practice. At the conference today listening to talks and doing networking get together after before flying back early tomorrow.

    A quick trip, but I’m sure I’ll lots to write about (and think about) in the future.