Tag: career2

I’ve written in the past that I think that it’s important the hire people that get along with your group first, and with technical skills second. It’s not that technical skills aren’t important, but I think that fitting in with a team is more important. We can teach someone to be a better developer. We can’t easily teach them to be a person that others like to work alongside. Certainly, however, the person needs to have the technical skills needed for the job.

When I was interviewed in college, the hiring manager told me there were two important tests to pass: Would he drive cross country with me and would he go out for a drink with me after work? That doesn’t imply that those are the most important (soft) skills for a candidate. It’s that all the other, more quantifiable skills were similar in all the candidates. The ability to get along socially was a differentiating factor.

I was reminded of this reading a blog post that hiring for culture can hurt your culture. It’s a look at a developer’s opinion about the ways in which some startups operate. However I think the author confuses social situations or behaviors with culture. The culture includes much more than our schedule of activities outside of work. It includes our attitude towards work, towards building software, towards each other. Certainly this is mentioned in the piece, but there seems to be an emphasis on the social interactions with new hires.

Certainly a person coming to work at a company that refuses to engage with others in any way outside of work can be a problem. We need to get along with each other as social creatures, and be able to hold a conversation with each other that might not involve work. However I’m not sure that anyone expects every other employee to have, discuss, and participate in the same interests as the manager or even a group of people.

Finding a cultural fit is a difficult task. I do think plenty of people hire the best programmer they find (whatever that means), regardless of their ability to get along with others. I also think plenty of managers hire someone that gets along great, but isn’t a good employee. As with many things in hiring, finding a balance of talent, attitude, work ethic, and social compatibility is important and worth striving for, but difficult to actually achieve in practice.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.9MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. 

I’m sure many of you see surveys that note IT job growth is up 30%. Or that executives want to hire 20% more people. Or that the market dictates that salaries will be going up 12%.

Those are exciting numbers, and I see them too. However I saw a great post that summed up the fact that those are just quotes, perhaps even desires, but not necessarily realities. This answer notes that what we want and what we’ll pay for are often two different things.

Many IT executives would like to hire more staff. They know that there’s a backlog in IT that can be reduced with additional staff. They might also believe that hiring more staff increases the chances of talented staff that can produce higher quality work, playing a game of numbers. They also know that newer hardware or software technologies can often produce better results for the organization.

However whatever their beliefs, they will often be constrained by budgets. There are always going to be other priorities in an organization that compete for additional resources. Sometimes IT will get what they want; sometimes they won’t. Often the end result will be less than they want, but more than other groups would have spent on technology.

The surveys and quotes we see published, good or bad, aren’t worthless. They’re often a reflection of a best case hope, like so many of the estimates that developers give about their work. The numbers can indicate a trend, but take them with a grain of salt. Apply a little skepticism and treat them like averages. Remember, an average of 50 can come from 49 and 51 or from 1 and 99, both pairs of numbers reflecting different realities. Above all remember that an average or ideal also doesn’t necessarily reflect what you, personally, will experience in your career.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.3MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. 

It’s interesting to think about the role of the DBA and how it might evolve in the future. I regularly see predictions about the DevOps movement, and increasing ability of fewer staff to manage larger scales of systems (more systems or more data). There is also the fundamental way in which larger “cloud” type providers (inside your organization or third parties) can include features or services that reduce the need for DBAs.

However I ran across a statement that I think certainly provides some view into how the DBA might be affected in the future. The statement was: “The more an organization values its data, the more the DBA is under pressure to provide access to this data.” That includes all the people working with and managing data, whether developers, sysadmins or dedicated DBAs. They must ensure the data is available and useful to clients.

I’m sure many people unconsciously realize this is their role, but they sometimes get caught up in looking at performance, or normalization, or backups, or some other task as being the highest priority task. In reality, we must continue to ensure backups are available if we need them, and systems perform well, and all the other ancillary tasks, but remember that backups and tuning and everything else are tasks needed in support of making data available for users.

More and more I really believe that anybody that functions as a data professional, whether that is a small part of their job or all they do, needs to keep this fact in mind. The data is the more important asset we work with and all our efforts need to be geared towards helping our users access in as many ways as possible.

Steve Jones

The Voice of the DBA Podcast

Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.1MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn.