Hiring, evaluating talent, managing DBA work, and workplace expectations.
36 associated posts35 primary posts
When you ask data people how they feel about AI, you get pretty rabid, extreme reactions. People either love it or hate it. Set that aside for a second, and let's zoom out and think about a bigger picture question.
What's it like to work with someone you know, versus a stranger?
In my consulting work, I often find myself saying the same things to clients - but they're not the kinds of things I said when I was a database administrator. I call these "Consulting Lines", and I talked through 'em:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCA0Oz-uk-s
Y'all posted & upvoted questions at https://pollgab.com/room/brento, and we finished up the session talking about the relationships between developers and database administrators.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8prxHPF5bo
"Out of the stuff on your resume, what are you the proudest of, the most excited about?
When I'm interviewing a candidate for one of my clients, I'll usually start with this question to help understand the resume. See, recruiters seem to actively encourage folks to keyword stuff their resume: to dump in everything and the kitchen sink, every task they've ever performed. Recruiters see the resume as a place to play Keyword Bingo.
When you're hiring a Junior DBA, ask yourself a few questions:
"What job did they have before this?"
Someone who's currently employed as a Junior DBA isn't looking for another Junior DBA job: they're looking for a Senior DBA job. Because of that, you have to rethink how you write the job description and minimum required qualifications.
When you're hiring a DBA, sysadmin, or developer, you're not paying them to answer Trivial Pursuit questions all day long.
You're hiring them to look at a screen, connect a few dots, and interpret what's happening.
There's a fine art to running a productive meeting, keeping the discussion focused and scoping things tight to meet your scheduled finish time. Today's consulting lines post is about keeping people happy while still finishing meetings on time. Let's join a troubleshooting session where I've been brought in to help a client whose AlwaysOn Availability Groups are failing…
Some of my consulting lines are all about context. Let's just jump right into a project kickoff meeting with an architect and a few developers:
The Conversation
Me: "So, what pains is this SQL Server having?"
Phil I. Buster: "When I first started out here, we had SQL Server 2005. The app only had a couple of users back then, so as we added functionality, we decided to keep the business logic in the database. It wasn't too bad at first - "
This has grown to become one of my favorite consulting lines. I don't use it often, but used judiciously, it's a lifesaver. I use it a few different ways: Using This Line at the Start of the Meeting If you know in advance that the organizer (or some of the attendees) tend to ramble on…
Before I became a consultant, I was on the other side of the conference room table - we would bring in consultants, and I'd be amazed at all the cool lines they whipped out. Now that I'm the one giving advice, I like sharing some of my favorite consulting lines that you can use in…
I have to deliver a lot of bad news. It's pretty much my full time job. Nobody calls us when things are going well. (Well, they tweet us, because that's free.)
Sometimes, that bad news is very dangerous - especially for the company as a whole, or its customers.
DBAs often complain about SAN Administrators. "You can't trust them." I've seen established DBAs write publicly that they resort to lying about how SQL Server works to get what they want from a SAN Administrator.
That's pretty toxic. Other DBAs start to think it's normal to have a terrible relationship with your SAN Administrator.
When it comes to hiring a SQL Server developer, we can pepper candidates with HR-type questions ("Tell me about a time when you had a conflict with a co-worker and how you resolved it.") but that doesn't give us a good sense of a developer's T-SQL skill level. Here are five questions that will give you a good idea how experienced and skilled a developer is.
On September 24, we published a blog post that we were looking for a new employee. We didn't advertise on any job listing sites (even though there are some really good ones out there). We tweeted about it a few times, but most of our publicity was that single post. We received more than 70 applications…
Hiring a DBA? Need to get a job description for the human resources folks? Here's how to get started.
First, decide whether it's a production or development DBA. Think of the database in terms of a fridge. When you run a restaurant, you need at least one (and probably several) refrigerators to keep your raw ingredients and your prepared dishes cold.
I get a lot of email, and I'm zealous about staying at Inbox Zero using the Getting Things Done productivity techniques. One of my favorite ways to handle email fast is by using templates, or as GMail calls them, Canned Responses. Email programs like Outlook let you set up multiple signatures, and I use those…
Even when you love being a DBA, working the job can turn into a grind. There’s many times when you’re up all night troubleshooting just to face another day at the office handling user complaints. You hear at the water cooler that you’ll need to improve performance with less hardware for the next year. You get an email that you need to be ready to virtualize everything in the next quarter, but nobody’s even sure which hypervisor you’ll use.
Developers want to work with them.
Sysadmins and SAN admins want to help them.
No, this isn't a touchy-feely inspirational post that talks you into taking leaps and bounds in your career. I write those every now and then, but that ain't today.
Instead, today's post is about a question: what's stopping you from snooping in your company's data?
The problem with being a Microsoft Certified Master is that people come running up with Master-level questions. I field a lot of very advanced questions completely out of the blue, and I can't help but raise an eyebrow.
Deckard: "After answering forty-two questions from the Voight-Kampff test, what's the pupil size of a Nexus-6 replicant?"
