Voice of the DBA

Tag: career2

  • The Challenge of Time Off

    I’ve been working full time for most of my life. Since I was 16, I’ve rarely worked less than full time, and often worked substantially more. There are times I’ve had two or three jobs, though fortunately I think those days are behind me. I have a great job now, perhaps the best job in the world, and I get a generous vacation allowance. However I do struggle to take time off some years. That’s my issue, and I’m working on trying to make sure I get away from work more. I appreciate the time off, but I also enjoy my job and the interactions I have with the community.

    However not everyone is in the same situation. There are plenty of people out there that get limited vacation, little support for taking time off from employers. There are those consultants that are self-employed and struggle with taking time off when it means they aren’t paid for that day. I’ve been in all of those situations, and here’s my advice.

    If you don’t think you get enough time off, then look for another job. The same thing applies if your boss doesn’t want to allow you to take the time off you are allotted. There are bad managers out there, and companies that look to take advantage of their employees. You can live with it, you can complain, or you can move on. The choice is up to you, but that’s what I’d do.

    I realize it’s not easy to just get a new job, but you can make a plan and move on. My wife and I did that, though it did take years. Life is short, but hopefully still lasts for many years. Making plans across years is the way to improve your situation over time, though you should still work to appreciate and enjoy the journey along the way.

    If you’re a consultant, the only thing I can say is that you need to budget. You need to limit your expenses and plan for vacation. The amount you bill may be out of your control, but you should have some idea of a range and you your expenses, your living standard, should be based on a number that allows you to take some time off each year. If it doesn’t, you can improve your skills and bill more, or find ways to reduce your expenses.

    I know this can be tough advice, but ultimately you are responsible for your life. You may be dealt a bad situation, but it is up to you to make the best of it, and learn to live within your means if you want to avoid the stress of overwork.

    Steve 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 at www.everydayjones.com.

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  • Powershell in a Month– Day 4 and 5 – Providers

    This is part of my Powershell Challenge, to learn more about PowerShell (PoSh) using the Learn Windows Powershell 3 in a Month of Lunches book by Don Jones.

    Day 4, and 5. This wasn’t a long chapter, but it came right around travel and vacation, and as a result, I ended up taking about 2 hours across multiple days. Mostly because I had to re-read things and re-type them. As a result, I’m marking this as two days. Plus, this will now line up the chapters.

    Providers are the “drivers”, I guess for Powershell. They allow you to interact with various systems through the Powershell commands. Another way of putting it is that they take some item and make it look like a file system. This means you can navigate the registry (with the registry provider) like your disk with CD, DIR, etc. It’s also why you can move through SQL Server in a folder-like hierarchy.

    This was a short chapter, and I’m not sure why it took so long, but I moved slow going through the exercises to creates files and folders, learning to use the New-Item or Set-Location commands instead of the mkdir or cd ones.  I did find this interesting.

    The lab exercises were easy, and once I could focus, I got through them quickly.

    The next chapter is pipelines, which is where I think the power of PowerShell starts to come through.

  • PVPs

    I had it happen to me. We had an SSL certificate for a website that one of my employers ran. I actually purchased the certificate, and it secured our communications for a couple years until one day it didn’t. The certificate expired and the website stopped accepting connections. If I had noticed, it might not have been a big deal. However when the owner of the company gets a call from one of his large customers, it’s an much bigger issue.

    If you worked at Microsoft last year when their security certificate expired, it was an even bigger deal. It’s not that an affected customer that sends a note; it’s affected, unaffected, and potential customers that hear about the issue from the media. It seems like tracking private virtual properties (PVPs) ought to be easy, but it’s not. As pointed out in this piece, there are a number of issues at an organizational level, and while there are fixes, it takes some effort.

    In many businesses that have periodic activities required for physical assets, there are often people dedicated to tracking, or performing the activity. Mechanics know about maintenance on vehicles, accountants renew leases, workers replace equipment nearing the end of service. Often the time lines and activities involved are understood, and individuals understand their responsibilities.

    This showcases another area in which technology is woefully immature. Need a certificate? It takes a person with specialized knowledge to understand what’s needed, purchase it, and install it. This person either then moves on to a new role without leaving instructions behind, or isn’t well equipped to understand the need to track the expiration and replacement of the technical item. There often isn’t even a system set up to handle replacements of these items, which might be superseded or replaced by some entirely new type of technical wizardry.

    Managing and tracking PVPs is hard, and I suspect, going to get harder. Security requirements increase, technical requirements grow, and specifications change. I’d like to say I’m confident Azure (or AWS or another large service) will never have another outage because of this, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they do.

    Steve 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 at www.everydayjones.com.

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  • Competition or Cooperation

    I once worked in a company with a stack ranking system. I was a manager, and hated the idea of ranking the people reporting to me in this system. I had a good staff, managing all three major RDBMS platforms (Oracle, DB2, SQL Server), and they performed their jobs well. At review time, when I was told I had to have some 2s (on a scale of 1-5) in addition to 3s and 4s, I was distressed. Having worked with and managed hundreds of people in my career, none of my staff was below expectations (a “2”). However I had to rank at least one person at that level.

    Microsoft has had this “stack ranking system” for years, and there has been plenty of speculation that it hasn’t encouraged the really talented people to work together, but instead it pushed employees apart. Apparently they’ve decided to move away from this system according to numerous reports. I have heard that the most talented people tried to ensure they weren’t working on the same team with other talented people, just to ensure they would continue to be highly ranked.

    I believe in teams. I believe in getting people to work together, and help each other. I know that successful software projects, those that require more than one developer, are never successes or failures because of one person. I know people contribute more or less than others, but the strength and value of those contributions are not strictly individual talent or effort. We need talented coders to solve tough problems, and we need average programmers to tackle mundane tasks. Both are necessary (along with many other roles) to ensure success of a project.

    Cooperation, assistance, teaching, learning, working together as a team, with each person helping the others to succeed is how I like to work. We don’t need winners and losers; we need success from everyone.

    Steve Jones

    Video and Audio versions

    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 at www.everydayjones.com.

    Follow Steve Jones on Twitter to find links and database related items and announcements.
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