This is the third year that Andy Warren and myself are hosting a networking dinner in Seattle, just before the PASS Summit. If you are new to the Summit, or just interested in meeting some new people, we hope you’ll join us on Monday, Nov 5, at Gordon Biersch, located in the Pacific Place mall on Pine St. It’s just a couple blocks from the Convention Center.
We don’t have anything formal planned, just a time and place for people to swing by, shake hands, introduce themselves and talk about what they do, or why they came, or just life in general. It’s a casual event that is just (barely) organized so you have a chance to meet other attendees on an off night.
If you don’t have plans and want to attend, come on by. Please register so we have an idea of the number of people coming.
It’s BYOD/BYOF (buy your own xxx), but there’s no fee to attend.
Can you divine what’s important for your career in the future?
Those of us in Information Technology are constantly learning to do more with the tools and platforms we have. There are no shortages of new systems to manage. Since staffing levels never increase as quickly as servers, we must find ways to manage and maintain more and more systems all the time. That’s fine since tools like Powershell or MultiScript allow us to extend our reach to many machines as easily as we work with one machine. That’s not quite accurate since the effort to build a repeatable process is greater than performing a task one time, however I have found that most of the time if I need to perform a process once, I’ll need to do it again.
Over time I’ve learned that investing in my own skills, and learning to work smarter and more efficiently, has paid dividends for me. Becoming more familiar with the business my employer is involved in has helped me to return more value to the company, as well as ensure that my employment is appreciated. As companies look to virtualize systems, move to cloud services, or find some other more efficient way of dealing with computing resources, it’s up to each of us to find new ways that we can provide value. That’s what system administrators need to do, and I suspect DBAs need to be thinking along these lines as well.
The world is getting more complex from an IT perspective. These days companies have their pick of candidates for many jobs, and the person that has a variety of skills in multiple areas with a history of solving problems is desirable. Even when companies have few candidates, they seem to be waiting to hire a candidate that is a good fit rather than picking the first person they find if that person lacks some of the skills the company needs.
As you continue along the path of your professional development, think about adding a variety of skills in different areas, skills that improve your efficiency, and allow the business to get more of their work done every day.
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.
I ran across this post about life at Stripe and there was one benefit listed that caught my eye. In the post, the author says “New employees are asked to send in specifications for their dream machine, which is then built and waiting for them on their first day.” I think that’s a great benefit, and it shows that the company values their employees and wants to ensure they start off with a little excitement.
This Friday I wanted to ask you what you’d do if that were offered to you. Most of us working for corporations get the same type of machine as all other technical employees, but imagine that isn’t the case.
What machine would you specify if your boss gave you the choice?
Personally I like my MacBook Air. It’s small, light, comes on instantly, and I find myself really enjoying OSX. The one thing it lacks is some horsepower, and if I need more I’d have to look at either one of the new Macbook Pros or the Lenovo 530. The former is very tempting right now, but the latter would allow me to replace my desktop as well since it can drive four external monitors.
If you could spec out your machine when starting a new job tomorrow, what would you want?
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.
If our systems go rogue, it’s not good for anyone. Keep those people around that understand them well.
I have always thought that computers do some amazing things, but they tend to do what we tell them to do, even if what we tell them to do is not what we want them to do. In those cases we usually find computers are helping us make mistakes faster than ever before. As we automate and link more and more systems, this can become a bigger and bigger problem in the world.
I ran across this short link on a rogue algorithm that caused a fluctuation in a number of stocks. It looks like this was a case of poor analysis and poor QA at one firm, bunt imagine if we had some type of “update” released to a large number of companies? This type of problem could cause a dramatic short term fluctuation in the stock market, which shouldn’t affect most of us in the long run, but you never know. If this caused a company to go out of business, and they were the company holding your retirement savings, you might feel differently.
This isn’t necessarily a problem that affects just financial institutions and their custom software. This is potentially a problem in any business that writes its own algorithms. That includes many of our companies, and many of us. We write queries, reports, and develop algorithms that help “the business” analyze data and make decisions that can affect our companies.
This is worrisome to me, especially when we have companies that press for more and more analysis, with algorithms written more and more quickly to respond to business events. Success in this area often depends on an understanding of the nature of the business and the meaning of data, and strong working relationships with the business analysts. That comes over time, and is easily lost when employee turnover is too high.
I hope that companies are learning that there is value to retaining employees, especially those that work with data and have invested effort in learning more about their business. Unfortunately I think that it take a disaster like this for some managers to understand the value of retaining employees and their knowledge. Even more unfortunate is the fact some managers never learn that.
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
We publish three versions of the podcast each day for you to enjoy.
Voice of the DBA 