Tag: Microsoft

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

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December 4, 2013

Becoming an MVP

I see a lot written about the Microsoft MVP program and the various impressions the MVPs leave in the community. It seems that the view of MVPs is mostly positive in the community, and I hope that I do my part to further that feeling with my actions.

However, one shouldn’t work to become an MVP. Personally I think it’s not a goal for anyone to make or work towards. The MVP award is a recognition of your community service from Microsoft. It does consider what contributions you make technically to help others, but this isn’t a test to pass or an evaluation of your skills.

I view the MVP as a side effect of the work I do. I enjoy writing about SQL Server and speaking at events to try and help people get better at their jobs, inspire them to try something new or solve a problem in a different way. I enjoy helping others, and being a part of this amazing SQL Server community.

You can read articles on becoming an MVP, Microsoft gives guidance, and there’s even a Wiki article on it. However I’d say you shouldn’t even worry about this. Do the things you enjoy, the things that give meaning to your job. If Microsoft things those things are worth of the award, great. If they don’t, you should still feel a sense of accomplishment over what you’ve done.

Steve Jones

October 31, 2013

If we can do it, so can you

We hear constantly about the benefits, and potential pitfalls of cloud based applications. There are certainly reasons to move to the cloud, or stay away, depending on your particular situation and requirements. However one thing I hadn’t thought was viable was software development in the cloud. Most of the companies I’ve seen that host applications in the cloud still do the development on desktops and laptops, with a build server somewhere on site. However Microsoft wants to show us that this isn’t necessary.

There is a push inside Microsoft to perform more of their development in the cloud. Across the last year or two, various managers inside Microsoft have been moving development to the cloud, typically starting with testing and code analysis. Those are great fits for cloud services, since they are used at discrete periods, but may requite lots of resources. One of the interesting things in the piece was that the first objectives was to speed up the continuous integration process. At Red Gate (my employer), we’ve seen a lot of benefits from implementing continuous integration, both in our applications and databases, and we’ve done a lot of work to smooth out those processes.

Obviously Microsoft might have an advantage over many of our other companies in terms of Azure resources and cost, but I would bet the reliability is similar for their developers. If they can make it work, on products like Windows, SQL Server, Sharepoint and more, I’d think that many of us could make use of the platform as well. I know a few people that have worked with TFS on Azure, and they’ve been pleased with the performance and reliability. There are any number of other software services, like GitHub, that make use of distributed, cloud-based services for software development.

However even if you don’t want to use the Azure platform, the idea of using virtual systems, of spinning up and down the machines you need to perform various functions makes lots of sense. You can make better use of your hardware resources, and even schedule continuous integration services (builds, tests, analysis) for different teams (or applications) at different times, improving your efficiency and not only speeding up your development processes, but hopefully improving the quality of the final code.

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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September 16, 2013

The Future of Knowledge Measurement

This is part 3 of a 3 part series of thoughts on certification and Microsoft technologies.

We’ll never be able to completely and accurately measure a person’s skills in technology. At least not in any cost- and time-effective way. Ultimately we want to come up with some way to weed through candidates and ensure they have a minimum aptitude for technology and some level of skill in the areas that are important to us. We want a way, with some level of confidence, to say that a person who has xx certification knows yy skills.

In the Microsoft world we can be sure that our platforms and technologies will change at least every 2-3 years, with major or minor revisions to all parts of the product we use. We might see minor tool changes, but fundamental feature enhancements or vice versa. However even when there are major changes, the revisions to the effective way we accomplish tasks doesn’t change much. It evolves, and I think that a core set of skills can be measured, and more importantly, scored.

How we do that, I’m not sure. As Brent Ozar said, however, the experiment must go on. We, as an industry and group, should be finding ways to assess our community, and drive forward our profession. I’d like to think that we could build an open source framework that allows for the presentation of a situation, and the evaluation of a result. It could be a framework like tsqlt, which allows us to write tests that can be evaluated by a scoring system. By taking a script of some sort, and comparing it to a “question”, some automated measurement would be able to determine if the question was answered (or partially answered).

Our community could easily build a bank of hundreds, if not thousands, of questions. Want to evaluate someone? Download 50 questions, drop someone in a room for an hour and see how much they get done. They might not finish, which would be a good test in and of itself. Run their answers through a scoring engine and get a report back. With tags, we could easily separate questions into a variety of packs that employers could use to test certain areas. Testing core skills, without too much worry about version specific items would allow questions to live for years. Heck, with the age of some SQL Server instances out here, I bet some companies still need SQL Server 2000 based tests.

Ultimately I don’t think Microsoft will properly build and maintain a framework to evaluate candidates. They have too much incentive to cheat. They can fool lots of employers with easy to pass, paper diplomas and turn a profit with lots of easy certifications that sound good, but don’t really test skills. The future of measurement in technology will be like it is in many other fields, with independent bodies that provide a minimal level of educational skill for most individuals. It will consist of granular tests that measure skills, in real situations, not question and answer trivia. Some people will slip through, some will cheat, but it will work well enough when it falls out of the hands of vendors.

Until that time, all you can do is prove your own skills, in person, through your publications, or with lots of good, valuable answers given to others.

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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September 11, 2013