Tag: career2

One of the things we’ve tried to do at SQLServerCentral is provide a way for SQL Server professionals to continue to learn more about the platform over time. Andy Warren and I have debated how to best do this over the years, and Andy has built a great presentation on Building a Professional Development Plan that I’d encourage you to watch or attend if you can.

One of the parts of any good plan is finding time to learn. While there are many ways in which to learn, many people seem to want an organized way of working through a particular topic. Books provide one method, while online courses such as those provided by Pluralsight are another.  There are also pre-cons at SQL Saturdays or other conferences, weeklong training classes, and other methods available. Which you choose might depend on how you best learn.

Any of these methods work, but all require some investment, both time and money. Setting aside the money for a minute, how much can you learn in a year if you use some on-demand method such as books or on-demand video. Is there some limit to what you can absorb and work with in any particular month or year?

I think there is. Certainly the amount you learn depends on how much you can practice and focus on a topic, as well as how closely the new skill is to your existing capabilities. The further you move away from an area you’re already comfortable with, the slower you may learn, and the greater investment to become competent in a new subject. Given that a month (or year) is a fixed amount of time, and we all have other responsibilities, how much can you actually learn and retain?

I used to think that a few months would build some competence, but I’m finding that after I learn for a few months, I really need a few months, or at least some time, of not learning, where I can practice and work with new skills I’ve been developing. I find that if I don’t take this time, too much of what I’ve learned becomes hard to remember, and even newer skills are hard to acquire.

Is it the same for you?

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.

This editorial was originally published on Dec 5, 2011. It is being re-run as Steve is out of town.

It’s been a long time since I received overtime at any job. Most of my IT work has been with a salary, and the expectation that I would work as needed to accomplish my assignments. Early in my career I worked as a contract for an hourly rate, and while it didn’t necessarily lower the hours I worked, I did receive a little more pay on long weeks. From there I worked for a company that provided “comp time” when the hours exceeded 20 hours in a month. That seemed to help reduce hours more than anything.

There’s a bill that’s in the US Congress that adds some new job classifications to the exemptions for overtime pay. In addition to the system administrative jobs, it now includes database and network professionals. I’m not sure how many people this affects as the overtime requirements disappear once you make more than $27.63 an hour. That equates to about an annual salary of 57,491, without the benefits. If you make less than this, you should be getting overtime.

Does overtime pay matter to most IT workers? I don’t know. There are lots of workers who make more than US$60,000 a year, and are exempt, but I suspect there are many others who make less than this amount and work long hours without any extra compensation. This bill is aimed squarely at reducing pay for those people in the industry that make the least amount of money.

I struggle with whether the benefits and abuses of a salary. On one hand salaries provide a level of security to workers, along with a guarantee of payment for work that cannot easily be measured in terms of output per unit of time. On the other hand, employers sometimes see a salary as a way to push workers to their limits, burn them out, and impose strict requirements on the work needed for deadlines, themselves often arbitrary.

I like the idea of allowing businesses to pay salaries, and stabilize their cost structures, but I do think we ought to implement a few bumpers that prevent abuses. Limiting hours across a month or quarter and ensuring that employees can take their vacations would be limits that I’d like to see implemented. This bill doesn’t affect those and I’m not sure we’ll see any limits implemented, but I do think it’s up to each person to stand up to their employer and ensure they are not overworking themselves.

Steve Jones

Do you want the red pill or the blue one?

Many of us know the famous scene in The Matrix where Neo decides if he will come out of his dream. We also see the exciting moments in the movie where he has various martial arts downloaded to his brain, and discovers he “knows kung fu” in a small fraction of time. Certainly he doesn’t ever need to physically practice the art, but much of learning is comprehending and understanding a subject in our brains.

We aren’t at the point of desiring a skill and purchasing a download. Yet. However there is research into using various types of stimulation to actually help improve learning and training. Using pilots and flight training, a complex and varied skill involving both physical coordination and mental understanding, the researchers think they can affect learning. Which is amazing.

This is barely scratching the surface of learning directly in the brain, but it is interesting to see people researching the topic. After all, this is an area that ought to be of great interest to those of us working in technology, where the acquisition of new skills is important. Few of us do it well, and any improvement that could dramatically improve our capabilities to adapt and grow as technology rapidly advances, would be welcome.

Unless it involves electrical shock potential. In that case, I’ll stick with my slow read-and-practice method for learning new skills.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.2MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.