Voice of the DBA

Tag: career2

  • Motivating the Team

    This editorial was originally published on Oct 7, 2009. It is being re-run as Steve is away on sabbatical.

    You’re a corporate worker, building applications that your business uses to sell it’s widgets, gizmos, doohickeys, or ho-hums. Whether you’re a developer or a DBA, it’s not exciting work. Nothing to write home to Mom about with any level of enthusiasm. It’s a daily grind of CRUD applications designed to improve the efficiency of business workers who enter data, or view reports about how things work in the real world.

    That seems to be a story played out in many companies all around the world. Lots of creative, talented people, all stuck in boring jobs cranking out code that supports the business. Over time they become jaded, un-motivated, or burned out at their jobs, perhaps even questioning their choice of career.

    How do you motivate people in that situation?

    I’ve seen lots of business seminars and presentations designed to increase moral, or somehow get people excited about their company. Most of them have failed miserably for me. I haven’t left feeling motivated, especially  over the couple last decades where it seems so many corporations’ management care little about their employees, and only about what their quarterly number will be. Or what their bonus might be as executives.

    Even though they are paid differently, everyone has to feel appreciated. – Roger Staubach

    It’s a great quote, and one that I think tells us what motivates people. We want praise, we want to be challenged, and we want to enjoy our work, but what we really need is to be appreciated. Make a worker feel like they matter and they will put up with and even enjoy their jobs more.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcasts

    Everyday Jones

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    Today’s podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo atwww.everydayjones.com.

  • Farewell

    This is my last day of work this quarter as I start my sabbatical at 5 o’clock today. I’ll be gone for the next six weeks, away from SQLServerCentral, trying to improve and grow myself while staying as unwired as I can during that time. The rest of the staff here at SQLServerCentral will pick up the load, and I’m sure everything will be fine.

    This is a bit scary for me. I’ve pretty much been employed full time since I was 17, only taking a few, short, involuntary stretches of unemployment in almost 30 years. Even during those times without a job I was focused on finding a job almost every day, so it felt as if I still had the job of finding a job during those times. I’m nervous about taking the time off, and certainly worried a bit about SQLServerCentral as I’m not sure I’ve been away from the site for more than a week since it was founded.

    This is a temporary farewell, as I’m planning on being back on July 14th, just in time to head to the UK for SQL Bits. I’ll likely be doing a touch of writing, and trying to get a little coding done on some side projects, but for the most part I won’t be answering email or checking on the site. That alone will be a good test of my personal growth. If I can avoid www.sqlservercentral.com, I think I’ll be doing well.

    For those of you that are interested, I’ll be posting on my blog, under the sabbatical tag. I’m trying to document some of my adventures, and hopefully I’ll have something to show for my efforts at the end. I’m nervous, but also a little excited. Six weeks to work on some projects away from work seem like a dream on top of my already amazing dream job.

    Steve Jones

    The Voice of the DBA Podcast

    Listen to the MP3 Audio ( 2.4MB) podcast or subscribe to the feed at iTunes and LibSyn. feed

    The Voice of the DBA podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.

  • A Little Learning with Pluralsight

    I’ve been working on a new presentation on testing using the tSQLt framework and was curious how other people are using the framework. I read through the documentation and various articles on Simple Talk. I also went through the Google Group and StackOverflow tags for tSQLt, gathering lots of viewpoints on how the framework is used.

    However I wanted more. I’ve tested T-SQL code before, but usually in the simplistic way that I see most SQL Server developers running tests. Contriving a bit of data, building a query that checks things, and moving on. I’ve never written formal SQL tests, and wanted to learn something.

    I turned to my friend, Google, and was surprised to see a course on Pluralsight pop up. I didn’t think tSQLt was popular enough to build a course, but apparently it was, so I signed on and went through the course. It was interesting, and I got a nice set of hints on how Dave Green uses tSQLt and some ideas on how I could enhance my presentation.

    Then I went looking for a few more courses. Since I was a bit laid up with my knee surgery, I was stuck in bed and rather than watch TV, I wandered around the Pluralsight site a bit. I was surprised to find a course on SQL Prompt and went through that, getting a few tips and tricks that I hadn’t used before. I also started a course on CTEs from Joe Sack, and I’ve learned a couple tricks in there.

    Overall, I’m impressed with Pluralsight. I’ve had a subscription for some time as an MVP, but hadn’t accessed it. However I’ll be spending a few minutes here and there working my way through the offerings, trying to learn a bit more about SQL Server, as well as tackle some C# and security.

  • The MCM Saga

    There was a comment posted on my Connect item for Open Sourcing the MCM. It said:

    “I have been able to contact the MS Learning team and they have given me some information about the content. My restatement of that, is that the ownership of the content is a bit complex. Some content is owned by other groups at Microsoft and is being repurposed for delivery in other workshops. In some cases the content is canibalized into a substantially different form. In some cases content was paid for and licensed content for a specific use, and it can’t just be reissued. At any rate, Microsoft doesn’t want to waste the money spent on it, and efforts are being made to use it in some manner. But you won’t see a consistent publishing pattern.”

    That’s reasonable, and I’m sure it’s true. I know multiple people worked on the project, and perhaps there is IP from some people that they don’t want released. I understand that, though I don’t like it.

    I made my case for this, and while plenty of MCMs disagreed, I was looking at this as a way to improve the community’s knowledge in building applications. Having specific scenarios to work through could help administrators and developers understand what types of real world problems they may face, or even introduce in their designs.

    It’s easy to say there’s all this information out there, but it’s incredibly unorganized. I’ve started to try and organize my content, build shorter, smaller posts that lead through a solution. I’m trying to help people (and myself) grow knowledge in a targeted way. Too much of the stuff out there doesn’t do that.