Category Archives: Career Advice
What Are You Working For?
I’ve been asking myself this lately as I prepare to move into a new phase shortly with my youngest daughter being a senior in high school. For the last twenty years, it was providing for my children and family to make sure they had opportunities for growth and development. Now my youngest will go off to college and our home will be quiet.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not kicking my children to the curb, but they don’t need my security as much as they prepare to spread their wings and fly away. My wife and I love to travel and I love SQL Server, so I will most likely dive more into my career with the intent of traveling and spending more time with her as well as socializing more in order to fill the nest so to speak.
It’s a great time to be alive, but what are you working for?
Migration Tedium Pays Off
Today I am going through the tedium of checking row counts and randomly verifying data in round two of our conversion from Oracle to SQL Server. This is very monotonous and it would be incredibly easy to tell my boss that everything checked out ok. Who would notice if I skipped a few of these tests? Me. That thought would always be in the back of my head, is this data really the same data that was in Oracle or are we missing some data. It would be my Tell Tale Heart (Edgar Allen Poe references always make for a great blog post)!
Being a database administrator is never about glamour, but admittedly there are more entertaining parts of the job. However, do not overlook these minute details or you might be facing the opportunity to update your resume. Enjoy!
SQL Saturday Submission Completed
My first full-length session submission for SQL Saturday has been input. Even if I do not get selected, I am moving forward in the right direction towards the completion of my goals for 2012. The topic, Best Practices Are Not Just Hypothetical, explores the best practice settings available during the installation that will set your server off on the right foot from the very beginning.
Stay tuned to see if my topic is selected for SQL Saturday Orlando to be held in Lake Mary, Florida, on September 29, 2012. Come on out and hopefully at the very least I can entertain you. Wish me luck! Enjoy!
Resume Updates
This week, I updated my resume in anticipation of the possible reduction in force. Not only did I update it, but I removed a lot of old technologies and went with a more streamlined resume. My previous resume was more like Curriculum Vitae format with five pages of details and now is down to a two page overview resume.
Within a day, I had four phone calls. Moral of the story: the format, style, and keywords can make a huge difference in helping you formulate a strategic plan for your next position. This is essential to maximizing your opportunities. I hope this helps so you on your journey. Enjoy.
SQL Formatting Tip
Last night was the first meeting for the new Tampa side SQL Server User Group and the turnout was great. I gave my first user group presentation and I was a little more nervous than the last time I gave this presentation. At this point, I am going to attribute that to the fact that I have to see this group every month where as in Pensacola I do not. But I am moving closer to completing my goals for the year and that is a great thing. To be a great speaker, obviously you have to practice as a speaker, seems simple enough.
Moving forward, I wanted to pass along a great tip last night from Pam Shaw (blog|twitter), our fearless leader. She shared a site with us called Instant SQL Formatter that provides automatic formatting and coloring of many different flavors of coding including SQL Server and Oracle. It is a pretty nifty utility especially with all of the available formatting options. Check it out and thanks Pam!
PASS Summit, Why Not?
Having my resume in several places, I receive solicitations from recruiters, LinkedIn, monster.com, etc. One common thread to all of these communiques? Not one of them says that they will send me to the PASS Summit. Why not?
If they are serious about their SQL Server position and finding a professional, as evidenced by their stringent requirements then why wouldn’t they want to help ensure that the DBA has the proper training necessary to complete the requested tasks?
You’ve seen the SQL Server DBA stringent requirements before:
- Must have a Bachelor’s degree and ten years experience in the information technology field, prefer Ph.D. or Brent Ozar.
- Must have five years experience with SQL Server 2012 and ten years with SQL Server 2007.
- Must have expert-level knowledge of SSIS, SSRS, SSMS, clustering, business intelligence, power-pivot, backup/recovery, mirroring, log-shipping, performance tuning, CLR, T-SQL, and a host of others that we will ask you about in the interview but neglected to list in the initial advertisement.
- It would be beneficial if you also had an expert-level knowledge of Oracle as we have one linked server, but not essential.
Seriously, why don’t the listings say that in order to show you how serious we are about your development, we are including a yearly commitment to sending you the PASS Summit? This is a fundamental change I would like to see happen in my lifetime. If they can weed you out based on their requirements, then why can’t we weed them out from the beginning? Something to ponder. Enjoy!
Never Heard of SQL Saturday?
Karla Landrum (twitter|blog), Community Evangelist for SQL PASS, made the comment this morning on Twitter that there are many people out there in the SQL community who still have not heard about SQL Saturday, the free training event that is taking the world by storm at a location near you every Saturday of the year.
This does not shock me even though I have been in the know for a while now because I was once that guy who did his job and did not know much about PASS or SQL Saturday. There was a point where I had belonged to professional associations and decided that annual fees with little to no interaction was no longer for me. Thus, when I started focusing on SQL Server several years ago, I did not seek out any professional associations for the simple fact that I had associated them with an annual fee for a nice little add-on to my resume. I had belonged to the HTML Writer’s Guild, the International Webmasters Association, and the Capital PC User Group in Washington, D.C. I joined that group and then could never make the meetings because of my work schedule, but it looked great on my resume. There were a few other groups, but I honestly cannot remember them now.
This is not a knock on these groups as I am sure that they are wonderful groups for some people, but that to me was what these professional associations were. SQL PASS is so much more and then some. I honestly wished someone had told me about it years ago. So make it your mission today to tell someone about PASS. They may already know, they may not. Do them a favor and spread the word. Enjoy!
First UG Presentation Scheduled
It is with great excitement that I announce that next Thursday night, July 26th, I will be presenting my Seven Deadly Sins of the Database Administrator at the first user group meeting for the second (actually third if you count BI) Tampa user group. Confused? Don’t be. The Tampa Bay SQL Server User Group meetings are actually held in Clearwater (also known as across the bay) which makes them difficult to attend for professionals who work on the Tampa side of the bay. Therefore, we have received approval from PASS to add a second group to the area and its first meeting will be next Thursday. Now you are up to speed, so let’s proceed.
This is the same presentation that I presented at the Pensacola SQL Saturday last month, but I will try to extend it out to 15 minutes. In other words I will speak slower and add more ‘ums’ in there. Just kidding, I hope.
I will however do something different this time. Drum roll please. I am going to give this presentation from my iPad using the Keynote application and the new VGA out adapter that I ordered. Why you ask, because I am a geek and there is no real demo in this presentation. I will update you all after the presentation so stay tuned. Enjoy.
RIF, the Most Evil Three Letters Today
RIF. Reduction in Force sounds much better to the palette when you say it as RIF, then you do not have to attach guilt or any form of emotional attachment to the word. It is a kinder, gentler word to most, but if you ask me it is pure evil. He Who Must Not Be Named evil, that’s right Voldemort evil.
I have been through it eight times now in the last seven years and survived five times. That’s a pretty good winning percentage, but it is not a good situation to be in for anyone involved. The stress, anxiety, and worry are not healthy for anyone. I came out of the situations with a smile on my face and with a positive attitude, but it still can be a painful situation for your family especially. I hope that you never have to go through it. Enjoy.
Money, My Two Cents
For some unknown reason, I have seen many articles and blogs lately regarding money. Maybe its my subconscious, I don’t know. Here are a couple of things that I have learned over the years.
First of all, money does buy happiness, to some degree. If you are not a happy person, then chances are whether you have money or not will not matter. I used to tell people who only rich people said that money cannot buy happiness and to some degree that is true because when you have money you can buy a jet ski. Have you ever seen anyone unhappy on a jet ski. I didn’t think so. Unless you just ran out of gas.
Don’t get me wrong, there are people who win the lottery everyday and they are miserable and then they eventually go broke. Why? Because they thought money would bring them happiness. It doesn’t work that way. Money only buys you the opportunity to be happy, it is up to you to make it happen.
Now for the elephant in the room, making more money in your job. A pay increase can only go so far to making you happy especially when the environment is toxic. However, I have found that the opposite is also true. When the market continues to move upward and your pay remains stagnant, it is only a matter of time before you will feel undervalued. There are people who stay for other reasons, obviously, but there will be a value to other intangibles and once that threshold is met, most people will leave for greener pastures.
I would think that if a company was unwilling to pay you the market value for your services, then you probably will not be happy in general for an extended period of time. I also understand that with some companies, there is no amount of money that will make you happy because there are too many other problems to compensate for the increase in pay. What do you think?
SQL Swampland 