Voice of the DBA

Tag: career

  • Muddle Through

    I used to work in the restaurant business. I got started after my first year at college, landing a job waiting tables in a new hotel. It was eye opening for me to see just how stressful and difficult that job can be. However, I wanted to earn money and jumped at opportunities. When we needed room service waiters to pick up shifts and elevators didn’t work, I carried trays up staircases, taking advantage of the opportunity. When a bartender didn’t show up, I volunteered to take the lunch shift. I had no idea where things were in the bar, I was 19 and didn’t know how to make drinks, and I’d make less money, but it was an opportunity that I knew would pay off at college.

    It did, and at the next three jobs, I wound up me getting hired, starting work, and having either no one to train me that day or a very busy shift where I was mostly on my own to survive. I had to muddle through and learn on the fly. The ability to do that, without panicking  being overwhelmed, or giving up has served me in quite a few positions since then.

    When I started working for various companies as a developer or DBA, I found myself in similar situations. Problems would arise, often the day or week I started, and I’d have to solve them. Usually with DBA positions,  I was the only one there, so I couldn’t depend on anyone else. It was  a good thing as I often found that sysadmins or developers were not managing or configuring databases in an efficient way. As I gained experience, I could make more and more of a difference earlier on at each organization.

    Kevin Feasel wrote a bit about his experiences with Lucerne (near the bottom), muddling through the need to write queries. I’ve seen similar stories from other friends working with SSIS, SSRS, Redis, Azure, and more. They don’t know a lot, but they dig in and learn, making mistakes, but getting tasks done for their employer.

    The ability to work through adversity, have some confidence, learn quickly, and be effective are valuable skills. Those data professionals that can do so often find more opportunities, challenges, they grow their skills, and get more compensation. Those that find reasons to avoid learning, that lack confidence in their ability to find a way to solve a problem, or are unwilling to tackle challenges often stagnate a bit. I’d like to think there are more of the former than latter in this business, but I constantly seem to find people that just look to repeat the same work they’ve done over and over for a long time.

    It can be mentally difficult to start a project using technology with which you have little familiarity. It can be disconcerting to have someone ask you a question that you can’t answer because you’ve barely begun to learn. That ability to muddle through, to keep learning, accepting that you don’t have answers but can find them, knowing that some of your answers will be wrong and you’ll need to backtrack. That ability to muddle through will serve you well.

    I’d urge you to develop it.

    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.

  • Valentines Day for Data Professionals

    It’s Valentine’s Day today, and if you’ve forgotten, you still have time to do a little shopping or show your partner that you value them. While this isn’t a public holiday in any country that I know of, many people do want to celebrate with someone special to them. In fact, if you forget about this day, chances are the next few might not be so pleasant.

    For many of us, we’ll spend nearly as much time at work each week as we might spend with our families. Between a few extra hours here and there at work, commuting, and sleep, it may often feel like we spend more time at work. Hopefully that’s not the case, and if it is, you should re-evaluate your current position.

    Most of us do have a relationship with our career. We’ve chosen it for some reason and are often locked into doing certain work in the short term. With today being a relationship holiday, I wanted to ask you to think about if you really love your career?

    I’m not speaking about your current job and employer. You might enjoy being a developer, DBA, or other data professional while not being enamored with the position and place you work now. I’m asking for the long term, are you happy with your career choice and looking to continue moving on this path.

    If you are, good for you, and I hope you find a great position that suits your life. If not, it doesn’t matter what you’ve done in the past. You can start moving forward in another direction today.

    I love my job, and I’ve enjoyed the last 25 years of working with SQL Server. I don’t know if I want to do another 25, but I certainly am still in love with my choice today.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.5MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • The Learning Choice

    I advocate learning constantly for those of us in technology. This might be especially important for data professionals as we are at the nexus of so muc activity these days. Data is important, our systems are under scrutiny for security, there is an every growing set of applications that want to connect, and we often struggle to keep up in a fast-paced, DevOps world. It feels like my plate is overflowing with the need to understand PowerShell, JSON, the cloud, Hadoop and its myriad of related technologies on the Microsoft Stack, machine learning, data science, statistics, and when I have time, make sure I’m up to date with SQL.

    Recently I’ve run across a few pieces that ask the question about where to spend time. There’s a blog on R v Python (I’ve seen quite a few of these) and a thread on deciding if ML skills are something a database developer should learn. These are just a few of the ones I’ve seen in the last month, as I guess lots of people are thinking and writing about New Year resolutions and goals.

    We have a limited amount of time for learning each day, week, month, or year. We might be able to increase that for a short time, perhaps months, but all of us need some balance in life. Given that there’s a limited amount of time, and that we need some focus and practice over time to absorb skills, where do you spend your effort in learning?

    Jeff Moden is an advocate of you sharpening your T-SQL skills with deep learning, as he sees this as one of the main reasons that applications perform poorly (and people post in our forums). Others lean towards adding new skills, perhaps adding SSIS proficiency or transitioning your analysis skills to Extended Events. Still others might seek to become more generally rounded by spending time on C# or Python.

    There are also other views, such as focusing on the skills you need in your current position. If you’re not happy, maybe you want to devote learning effort to get a job in an area where you’re passionate. Or maybe you just want to make more money, and are willing to spend time in those technologies that are paying more.

    The choice is up to you, and I can’t give you the answer that suits your path. You must find a balance between work and the rest of life, and make the choices that best fits you. I don’t want to imply this is easy. Thinking about the things that really matter to you and affect how you approach each day is a difficult exercise. My advice is that you go in one of two ways. If your career is something that you feel passionate about, focus your learning in a way that will help you find a job that brings you purpose. If you just need a job to pay the bills, learn things that increase your earnings, but ensure that you have family, faith, hobbies, or some other endeavor outside of work that brings purpose and fulfillment to you.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 5.0MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and Libsyn.

  • Learning Goals–January Review

    In December I participated in T-SQL Tuesday #97 and wrote a post about 2018 goals. I promptly spent two weeks out of the country and then a relaxing holiday season. Actually, holidays extended slightly with a ski trip and a wedding in January.

    This is a look back at my goals, since I have a monthly reminder to do so. This is the first review, a little late as I’ve struggled to focus a bit on work in January, but here goes.

    Progress

    I picked two things to work on this year: Python and Extended Events. I’m failing miserably in both.

    I did work on a little Python in solving a few of the Advent of Code puzzles, but I’ve only read a few pages in the Machine Learning book and not much else. I’ve gotten distracted by other items on my list.

    I haven’t done anything on Extended Events.

    I did play with a little more Pester, and I set up an MVC site in a project for a demo, so I tackled things that interest me, but not in the extra areas I wanted to learn.

    Planning and Moving Forward

    I didn’t actually do my planning in December. When the appointment came up, I was a little buried with other items and let it pass without rescheduling.

    Moving forward, here’s what I want to do. I’m going to set a reminder for Tuesday afternoons to spend an hour on XE. I’ll set that for 3 months and see where we stand. I’m hoping to work through a bit of Pluralsight courses and then some of Jason Brimhall’s series on his blog.

    For Python, I’m going to take some time on Friday mornings here. That’s likely a slower time for me, so I’m scheduling a half hour to work on something with Python. I need to refresh some core skills and then move on from there. I’ll likely go back through a bit of the Dive into Python book, then try moving to a bit of ML stuff. This is good as I’ll get some content, at least questions of the day, out of this work.

    I also realize that I continue to spend some time on R, as this is a part of SQL Server and it’s an area that generates some content for SSC. That along with my MVC project are things that will distract me a bit, but I’ll try to push forward in all these directions.

    Hopefully this will result in a better review next month.