Blog

Let’s get this out of the way: I’m every bit as surprised as you are that I’m going to work for Brent Ozar Unlimited®. Two months ago, I would not have believed it.

I saw the blog post, just as you did. And I dismissed it. I believed because it wasn’t a BI job, I wasn’t the right person for it. I told my wife, “That’s a great job, but not for me.” Then a funny thing happened. She said, “If it’s so great, go ahead and apply for it.”

At that moment, my thinking changed from “Why bother?” to…

WHY NOT?

I went back and re-read the blog post. I read over exactly what Kendra was asking for. I noticed there was nothing — nothing — about being a DBA. I read last year’s blog post for Employee #1 and saw it was markedly different. Employee #1 had to be a DBA; Employee #2 could be anyone.

I contemplated what working for them would be like. I’d travel infrequently and work from home. I’d get to do training work. I’d get to make videos (right in my wheelhouse; I went to college to be a screenwriter). I’d learn a metric ton about SQL Server from incredibly sharp and experienced people. (In a sense, I also was picking all my co-workers — four people I enjoy spending time with.) In short, they’d pay me to do what I already love doing and I’m doing for free. As if I needed further proof, I found a note I’d written to myself over a year ago that listed my dream job attributes.

One by one, I went down the list. One by one, they matched.

Time to get to work.

LIGHTS! CAMERA! ACTION!

It was the perfect scenario. I love making videos and here I was applying to a company that (among other things) makes videos. Naturally, the only way I could possibly express interest in this job was a video. I got my hands on a trial version of Adobe Premiere, searched my mental movie library for funny clips to use, and 18 hours later I sent in the finished video. In a bit of subliminal sleight-of-hand, I titled it, “‘So You’re Hiring’ Doug Lane”.

Once I’d sent that in, I got to work positioning myself for the best possible shot at my dream job. I wanted to know what their customer experience was like, so I bought and completed Kendra’s DBA Job Interview Question and Answer Kit (I know! Too perfect!). I watched sample videos from Brent, Jeremiah, and Jes. I read the supplemental PDFs that go with the videos. I downloaded and ran sp_Blitz® on a couple of my own VMs. I wanted to be able to offer feedback on as many products as I could. I wanted them to know that I cared about their business.

WE’LL TALK ABOUT COFFEE, DOGS, DAUGHTERS…NO BIG WHOOP.

I’d never interviewed with people I knew ahead of time, let alone people I considered friends. I wasn’t quite sure how to behave. I was trying to toe the line between casual banter and serious discussion. I figured I’d let them set the tone for what was appropriate. Fortunately, Brent, Kendra, and Jeremiah all put me at ease, and I simply stopped worrying about it after a while.

I thought I only really botched one question: “When was the last time you caused a production outage?” Now, I’ve brought down a production box through pure idiocy more times than I can count, but I’ve never brought my entire company to its knees. That’s how I interpreted the question and thus answered, “I don’t think I’ve ever done that.” YEAH, RIGHT. I did go back and clarify that later on, but still felt like an doofus on that one.

After the interview, I sent them a quick thank-you e-mail restating what I thought they were looking for and how I was a good fit, as well as a couple of changes I’d suggested for sp_Blitz®.

TALK AMONGST YOURSELVES…I’LL GIVE YOU A TOPIC.

The tech interview was more challenging. In the first two minutes of poking around Brent’s VM, I had somehow destroyed it. I couldn’t right-click in Kendra’s VM so I had to ask her to do it. Every time. It didn’t help that the lighting in my house was terrible; I looked like one of those “Meth: NOT EVEN ONCE” poster guys on my webcam and it bugged the hell out of me.

I was slow to recognize certain symptoms, but ultimately found the problem. I told myself the whole interview was just okay, and didn’t feel too good about my chances. When Kendra asked, “How do you think you did?” my stomach filled with dread.

NO WAY!…WAY!

An hour later, I got another meeting request from the group. I couldn’t tell if it was to immediately disqualify me or to make an offer. I couldn’t resist screaming with joy when I found out.

And here we are.

WHAT ABOUT BI?

It seems odd to make such a sharp career turn from BI to the database engine. In truth, this has been a long time coming. My favorite SQL Server BI product, Reporting Services, hasn’t had a major update since 2008. More and more BI functionality is ending up in Excel or SharePoint: two places I’m not all that interested in following. Plus, the DAX/Tabular/Power Everything revolution meant I was going to have to start over learning a new BI language, new model, and new tools. My heart just isn’t in that — not as much as I’d need it to be to continue down that path.

At the same time, I’m looking forward to contributing what BI knowledge I have that’s still valid and useful (one benefit of SSRS’s slow pace) to Brent Ozar Unlimited®. I expect Jes and I will put our heads together for some SSRS fun in the days to come.

SECOND WIND

Last year, I hit a wall…hard. I was overworked at work. I wasn’t doing anything fun or interesting with SQL Server. I plateaued as a speaker, doing my same stock SSRS talk for every presentation. I wasn’t blogging much. I got very sick right before the PASS Summit and had a miserable time there. 2012 was awful. I couldn’t wait for 2013 to arrive.

This year has been a different story. I got three new presentations off the ground, including a murder mystery session I’ve had percolating for two years. I presented to over 300 people on Reporting Services at the PASS Summit last month. And of course, I’ve somehow talked the very nice people sketched all over this site into hiring me. Even just two months ago, I never would have thought that was possible.

I was listening to Billy Joel (I love Billy Joel) at my desk a couple of weeks ago and in one of those transcendent moments where life compels you to pay attention, I stopped working and just listened to what I was hearing:

I survived all those long lonely days
When it seemed I did not have a friend
‘Cause all I needed was a little faith
So I could catch my breath and face the world again

Don’t forget your second wind
Sooner or later you’ll feel that momentum kick in

I leaned back in my chair and fought back tears, unsuccessfully. My second wind had come.

I can’t wait to see where it carries me.

What was the interview like for the fine folks who went through it?

Talking Points

We’re big believers that one of most important things for a consultant is their ability to interact with customers. The type of work we do relies on communicating clearly with our customers, and we wanted to make sure that our interview process reflected that.

We also wanted to make sure we asked candidates what they thought about the job without outright saying “Hey, what would you think if we asked you to do this?”

Tell Me About You

When you’re a small company, there’s no escaping your co-workers… or your management. We asked the candidates a few questions to make sure that we were all on the same page.

The questions that we ask are no different than the questions that you’ll get asked on any other kind of job interview – What excites you? What do you dread? Knowing what motivates people is really important. If you dread looking at a new SQL Server every week, you’re not going to enjoy working with us.

There aren’t any right or wrong answers, there are just answers that told us more about the candidates. That’s why we also ask fun questions like “What was the last time you caused a production outage?” We’ve all broken things and sharing funny stories about the ways that we’ve broken production environments is always a good way to break the ice, both with candidates and when we’re working with clients.

What would you say… we do here?

We asked the candidates to tell us about us. Well, that’s not entirely fair. We first asked people why they wanted to work with us. There’s no right or wrong answer, but as an employer it’s helpful to know what motivates people. There are different ways to motivate different types of people; knowing why someone wants to join the team helps us understand how we can motivate an employee and keep them interested in the job. Hey, even the most exciting job can seem like a slog some days.

How would you feel if I told you that your job would include creating an 80 slide presentation every week? What if I added in that the recommendations would be custom for an individual client? How would that make you feel? Not everything we work on is a rocket science. Sure, we do our fair share of high end performance tuning, but a lot of what we do is design ways for our clients to solve their every day problems. We help clients understand and prioritize their solutions by creating presentations that summarize the key pain points and solutions to those problems.

If the thought of writing an 80 page presentation every week was something a candidate dreaded, we knew that we weren’t the right fit. Some people are passionate about digging into problems, building a plan, and then implementing the plan themselves. Other people like to teach.

What Didn’t We Ask?

What we didn’t do is ask candidates a lot of minutiae. While it’s important to know technical details about SQL Server, we know that you can look this information up online. With co-workers like Brent, Kendra, and Jes a smart answer is only a quick email away.

There’s nothing secret about our interview process. These are the kinds of questions that potential employees can expect to hear wherever they interview.

Was There A Technical Screen?

Oh yeah, we had a technical screen. After the first round of interviews, we discussed who should move on to the second round. Since we didn’t ask any of the candidates difficult technical questions in the first round of the process, we wanted a way to see how they worked under the usual types of pressure that we deal with.

We set up a pair of demo environments and invited Doug to take a look at them and tell us what was wrong. Once again, we weren’t looking for right or wrong answers; we wanted to see how Doug looked at each instance and get a feel for how he approached problems. In an amusing turn of events, one of our demo environments was accidentally corrupted and couldn’t even boot. We didn’t ask Doug to look at that because, let’s face it, when you find corruption you should just call Microsoft.

Throughout our process, there weren’t any wrong answers. We looked for people who were as excited about technology as we are, who share a passion for learning and growing, and who didn’t laugh when Brent broke his VM during the technical screen.

These four things are important if you want to join us in Cabo:

1. Demonstrate curiosity about the technology you use.

Don’t focus on the specific technology you think we want – follow your dreams. If you use a technology on a daily basis to get your job done, be curious about how it works. Read books and blogs. Ask questions. Debate the answers. Get involved in the places where that technology is discussed.

One of the many things I love about working with Jeremiah, Kendra, and Jes is that they want to run experiments to verify their ideas. It’s not enough for them to read an answer – they want to see it in action. When a user group attendee asks a question we haven’t heard before, we all leap to the keyboards trying to figure it out for ourselves, and then we want to blog about it afterwards.

2. Share what you’ve learned by delivering remarkable training.

When someone walks out of one of your user group presentations or gets to the end of a blog post, they should be talking about what a great job you did.

As a presenter myself, I used to think this meant uncovering an undocumented or obscure feature that nobody else knew and blowing them away with my encyclopedia of knowledge. That’s not it at all – you can be remarkable on a 100-level topic.

Don’t think “It’s all been done” – because you haven’t brought your own unique and entertaining voice to the topic. Doug’s SQL Server Murder Mystery presentation was a great example of bringing very common material to life in a fun, addictive way that gets audience members talking.

3. Have a fun yet mature personality both online and offline.

On one extreme, the market for the written instruction manual is already taken by Books Online.

On the other extreme, there’s Sandro on Project Runway.

Consultants have to find a balance between the two by bringing their personality to their work, but not turning the workplace into a bad drama-laden talk show where people are screaming about politics and religion and OH MY GOD, THE SAN ADMIN IS TRYING TO RUIN MY LIFE!

During Doug’s PASS Summit presentation this year, he had a make-it-work moment when someone asked him a question and SSRS didn’t work the way he expected it to. He froze for a second, then thought through the problem, explained it, and got the audience to laugh about it. In that one moment, he showed that he was calm under pressure, and even better, calm enough to make the right joke.

4. Keep growing.

Years ago, I blogged about a couple of my own presenting mistakes. At TechEd 2010, for example, I made a political joke that didn’t fly with all of the attendees, and I reacted poorly when someone pushed me hard on a question. I watched the videos of my work, tweaked my delivery, and kept growing as a presenter and as a person. I was open to criticism, and I still am, and you’ve gotta be too. It’s not enough to just respond to comments, but you’ve also gotta be able to read between the lines and figure out what I need to do to succeed.

These tips aren’t just for becoming employee #3 at Brent Ozar Unlimited®. (After all, we had a handful of applicants who met these qualifications.) Follow these tips, and you’ll always be employee #1 at your current job, and you’ll have a line of people ready to hire you.

This video was my first introduction to Doug Lane (Blog – Twitter):

You can see the full video on SQLcruise.com, where Doug had entered a contest for a free cruise a couple of years ago. Of course he was picked as one of the winners, because I was in stitches as soon as I saw the viking horns moving through the cubicles.

When I met him in person on the cruise, he lived up to expectations by being witty, smart, humble, and just genuinely fun to be around. I enjoyed being around him, and I wished I could hang out with him more often.

Fast forward to last month, when he answered our call for SQL Server people looking for a good time. We got a ton of good responses that we were really excited about, and this week we’ll blog about the hiring, interviewing, and tech screening process. Doug was definitely one of those people where we all said “Wow!” out loud when we saw his name on the email.

We didn’t even have to look at the email contents to know Doug’s contributions to the community. I’d been particularly excited about his recent presentation idea, SQL Server Murder Mystery Hour: Dead Reports Don’t Talk. He turned the session into a fun, interactive experience.

When we *did* look at his email’s contents, Doug blew us away again with a video about his community contributions:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2uD9Nhgj2E

He knew we did a lot of video work, and he wanted to show that he understood how we work. Jeremiah, Kendra, and I are so passionate about making databases easier – and more fun. Just like Jes (our Employee #1), Doug really gets that.

We’re so excited to have Doug join our team.