Voice of the DBA

Tag: work

  • You’ve Changed. Has Your Employer?

    This past year has been one to remember. It’s disrupted lives and changed the world in many ways. Whether you have been cautious or fearless, scared or angry, the pandemic has changed you and the world. There’s an interesting read at Fast Company about life during the pandemic and how life has been turbulent from one point of view. 

    While I related to some of what the author wrote, I didn’t relate to a lot of it. I also know I’ve been lucky, and relatively lightly affected by this pandemic. I’ve published, and needed, coping tips at times, but I’ve been able to live my life, get outside, still coach youth, still visit some restaurants and take some limited vacations. I’ve looked back periodically, recording how I feel about life. I’ve changed, and I’ve struggled, but I’ve also been able to do things and I didn’t have the lockdown, and the limited life that some tech pros had, and I certainly didn’t have the struggles with security and finances that many less privileged dealt with.

    I’ve also had a great company that recognized issues last February and started preparing us, even before the UK went into a lockdown. While I haven’t visited with fellow employees in person, we’ve adapted and continued with some level of success for over a year. We hire and onboard people, software is getting written and sold, and business moves on, in many ways a reasonable facsimile of what we did in 2019.

    We’ve also changed. Remote offices have closed. A limited, experimental opening has few people actually taking advantage of going to work in a group. We’ve adopted and abandoned some of the early coping meetings and are looking for new ones. We’ve promised people they can move away from a city with an office, though remain within a reasonable travel time, for the rest of the year. All to provide some stability and allow employees to make concrete future plans for more than the next few months.

    We are experimenting with remote first, which is an attempt to adapt for the future to a distributed workforce, including our annual reteaming. I suspect trips to the office for many, including me, will be rarely scheduled, and used more for team building and brainstorming, with less tactical, let’s do something for today, work. I’m hoping we still do get together, but time will tell.

    I wonder how many of you will see your work change. We’re the privileged group, working in a field where we can accomplish tasks without physical interaction, but one where many of us might find that we do crave some sort of social touch. Maybe the world has changed it, and maybe it’s changed some interactions, but I also suspect some companies are looking forward to returning to the world as it was in 2019.

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.

  • Working in a Distributed Fashion

    Recently at the Redgate Summit, Kendra (b|t) noted that all the developers working for her are doing so in a distributed fashion. She is a product manager at Redgate, and her team uses git to move source code around and share it with different members for the applications they work on.

    For database work, I often see people using a shared database, which can create issues between developers, though many teams accept this as a part of working on the same project. We often just expect that our code is in the shared database, which means we don’t need to actually move it around. Hopefully, we do put it into version control.

    Has anything changed during the pandemic for how you work with your team? Or with other teams? I assume you don’t see people, but you do need to share things, or maybe you’ve moved away from shared databases. In that case, you might have some tricks for sharing technical code or other things that are a part of your work.

    Most of our work in this business is digital, so we likely adapted fairly easily to remote work. However, it might not have been completely seamless, and if things have changed, maybe you want to leave a comment on what’s different.

    For most of the work I typically do, it was always remote. While I miss collaborating with people in person, something I used to do regularly, the actual bits I need to move and share work in the same way. Actually, they work in more ways, as we’ve found new and interesting ways to share things outside of email and chat. Mural, Kanban boards, and even more video recording and posting have become more a part of my work day than they ever were before the pandemic.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.

  • Every IT Organization is a Snowflake

    I was listening to a presentation on IT organizations and how they can change and improve in the future. At one point the speaker said that “every IT organization is a snowflake.”

    Is this true? Do you think that each place you’ve worked is completely unique? Certainly the names of servers, IP addresses, and plenty of technical details differ. The internal applications are coded differently, colors, shapes, UX, all could vary.

    But do you think that your IT group is a snowflake? That term in some sense means unique, but in a derogatory way. It is used to represent people who are easily offended by something different. While I’ve not always been pleased with the way an IT department is structured or managed, I’m not sure I’ve been offended.

    I do think that every organization has some assembled its staff, process, technology, and more into a unique set of resources. However, I also think there are many commonalities between how the departments are run. After all, managers change jobs as often as technical people, and they will bring their processes and habits with them.

    While every situation is unique, I don’t know I think that many IT departments are snowflakes. As I work with customers, both in development and operations, I find many of them fall into a few broad categories in how they run their business. If you disagree, leave me a comment today.

    Steve Jones

  • Viva

    I want holographic screens and meetings. Heck, I’d like Teams/Slack/Zoom/etc. to recognize multiple screens and let me separate out different cameras to different screens. I’d like to be able to see more than a tiny thumbnail of a presenter, or of other people that are in a meeting. That might be one of the things I miss most when I’m in these virtual meetings. I can often barely see others.

    Microsoft Viva is a new platform for remote work and collaboration. I’m not completely sure what it is, though there is a video with the cool, enticing holographic screens. It’s not an app, but appears to be some way to connect various information in an organization into Teams. It’s like an intranet from the 90s, but designed to help someone navigate their organization and work environment.

    I’m all for bringing together more data, and especially making it easier for people to do so. I love all the single-sign on we have at Redgate, but everyone produces so much data through tickets, feedback from customers, notes in chat apps, emails, announcements made everywhere, internally and externally, video updates, and more. I find it extremely hard to keep up, or to even know if I’m keeping up enough, too little, or too much.

    What I really need is some prioritization and triage for me. For me personally my role. That sounds like I want a personal digital assistant, which I don’t know I’d have confidence in. I suppose I wouldn’t have confidence in a human assistant until I’d trained them, so maybe this is a similar task I’d need to complete, whether it’s a computer or human. I’d have to build trust, and expectations about how to deal with different situations.

    With software, however, I’d worry about data privacy. I know this is still an issue with humans, but there is less scale for humans. They can’t learn and remember as much, and there is less secret access to about what my human assistant might know. After all, they know, or should know, if they tell someone something. However, what a digital system stores can be accessed by, well, who knows.

    At least I feel there is a potential problem here. Maybe I’m just worried, but many of the problems I see with computers have to do with the scale of data access. Both in the volumes of data someone can see, but also the variety of people that can see the data. Microsoft has already had some issues with trying to boost productivity for individuals. They’ve gotten complaints over what they store and report on, and more data might make that worse. Perhaps they are going to find a balance with insights and privacy, but I don’t want to be a test subject for this.

    Changing the way we work, helping individuals be more productive and accountable, while protecting their rights privacy is hard. I applaud Microsoft for trying something, mostly because I think remote work will continue to be a part of our lives and it’s not great. I suspect that this is like many of their new ideas, half-baked and incomplete. They want to release something, and it might not be much more than minimally viable. Whether they continue to invest and grow this into a useful tool remains to be seen, but I hope they do. I’d certainly like to have more useful ways to learn, collaborate, and communicate.

    Especially if they build holographic screens.

    Steve Jones

    Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.