I've never attended this in the past, but I've wanted to. As the father of young girl I want to be sure that my daughter has the same opportunities as my sons in the career world. Supporting other women in technology just feels like something I should do.
The luncheon was a panel of 4 women, moderated by Wendy Patrick. Kathi Kellenburger, Jessica Moss, Cathi Rodgveller, and Lynn Langit participated, sharing their stories and backgrounds. From Kathi's inspiration from her own daughter to get started with Active Server Pages to Jessica providing a roll model for a friend's young girls, it's inspiring to hear them talk with a passion on how to interest young women in technology.
Cathy Rodgveller has started IGNITE, a group looking to inspire young women in the Seattle school districts. I think that exposing children to options, and getting them to just consider alternative careers is something we need to do more of. Cathy has also created other groups that help other minorities, empowering them to open their minds to other
We already have less math, science, and engineering students in the US than in the past, but the percentage of women is declining. That's disconcerting to me. I've enjoyed seeing more and more women coming to the PASS Summit every year, and becoming a larger proportion of the data professional population. I hope that it continues in the future.
Lynn Langit, author and BI professional, gave us ideas about how to grow our efforts. She asked everyone to tweet or text someone and show support for women in technology. Brian Kelley was my tweet since he's not here, he has a daughter, and I think he'd like this. Lynn donates a portion of her royalties from her BI book to DigiGirlz. If you need a BI book, that's a good reason to pick Lynn's among the others. Put your money where you mouth is.
Use your voice, engage with girls, is Lynn's message.
If there's one thing I'd learned in my life, it's the power of words. I write on a regular basis, and he feedback I get from so many of you is how I make you think. I hear how I inspire others to reconsider their viewpoint, to stop for a moment and think about things in a new way. Take the time to talk to a women, a girl, a minority and show them that they can do succeed in technology if they want to.
There is tremendous power in just talking about possibilities.
How do you break the image? Cathy sees young women stuck with myths about working in technology. You have to work alone, be super smart, long hours, etc. They are misconceptions. Young women don't know what is involved, and we should get involved. Share your story.
A few notes from the question and answer time.
Men constantly ask for things from Lynn, women don't (time, money, freebies, etc). Why? Women need to speak up and ask for help, support, etc.
Why women's participation in technology has fallen? Girls are not inspired by technology. They are not encouraged or supported in schools to get interested in technology. Is that true? I wonder. My children have had a number of "technology" teachers, though it was not programming or technical work. Cathy says IGNITE is very inexpensive to run, so it's worth bringing up to local schools. I'll pass it along to the technology teachers in my school district.
How does a man inspire a girl in technology? The panel talked about the importance of men participating, but it's sad that they didn't give any ideas for men.
That's true, and different groups need to help other groups. Women should focus on women. Minorities on minorities. Technologists focus on technology. It takes a small effort from many people, each of us focusing in our own area, the effect changes. If we say that everyone should focus on everyone, there is no focus.
Education is the key. Teach young people about many ideas, a variety of thoughts, teach them to think for themselves.
This is part II of my journey to being a DBA. I was "tagged" by Jacob Sebastian, so I decided to make my entry. Yesterday's entry, Part I, looked at my education, and today I'll talk about my career.
I wanted some practical experience, and I thought that an internship would be good. Even if I took another year to graduate, it would help ensure I got a good job, so I started looking around. This was 1991, and the Internet hadn't exploded. Windows was unknown, and computers were being used in business, but they weren't as commonplace as you might expect. The local power company, Virginia Power, had offered internships to students at ODU and since I was still an EE major at the time, I applied.
I'd learned some tricks for interviewing my senior year of college, and one of those was to research the company and prepare a custom cover letter for your resume. Another was to be prepared for the interview by showing some knowledge about the company. So I did that, heading to the school library to look through magazines and the microfiche for information on Virginia Power, which was owned by Dominion Resources. I picked up a few facts, applied, had a great interview and got a job.
I was assigned as an EE assistant to the Surry Nuclear Power Station. When I heard the offer, I was both surprised and a little nervous. I knew little about nuclear power, and wasn't sure how closely I wanted to learn more. But it was a good internship, it paid something like $12/hour in 1991, which was good money, and it was a new experience. Plus I had to get a security clearance. I later learned that was a stumbling block for many people. Luckily I had no major issues in my past.
Working at Surry was interesting. My first few weeks involved no computer time. I worked with electrical engineers, mainly dealing with paperwork and ensuring things were properly signed off and filed. The amount of regulation in this industry amazed me. After a few weeks my boss asked me if I had computer skills and could I help him with a Lotus 1-2-3 project. He was trying to manage a schedule of projects and calculate times for various items. I said I could figure it out and entered the wonderful world of Lotus 1-2-3 macros.
I built one of those spreadsheets that recalculates all kinds of things when it's opened; the kind that makes DBAs cringe. It was a classic example of knowledge being stored in a spreadsheet that would be better stored in a database, but we didn't know how to do that and no resources were available from IT to help. It worked well in a limited capacity, but not great.
Around this time I met the IT guy for the power station. He was rough, gruff, ex-Navy EOD (explosive ordinance and demolitions) expert that ran a tight IT ship. He had 3 people + an intern supporting 1400 people at the station, and roughly 800 PCs. He noticed my work and said that he had a project that was similar and could probably help us better than my spreadsheets. He asked me if I knew about databases, and gave me a book on dBase III. I dug through it in a week and received a book on Clipper for my troubles. His project was based on Clipper for DOS, and I spent a week learning the architecture and basics of how a Clipper program and database was structured. Most of the programming made sense to me and I was off and running, finishing off his work.
I was nearing the end of my internship for the summer, and I realized that EE wasn't the area for me. My boss agreed, and arranged to transfer to the IT department. There was another program designed to manage workloads among various departments in the power station and so my new boss asked me if I wanted to continue working part time in the fall. The internship arrangement was a semester working, then a semester of school, then repeat. I agreed, and took on a heavy load that fall. My schedule consisted of:
Needless to say I was exhausted most of the time, and eventually realized that I couldn't maintain this schedule. I tailed off after Thanksgiving, quitting the restaurant job and surviving on my savings and a small paycheck. However I also gained some programming experience and built a system that many secretaries appreciated.
I was offered the chance to start my spring internship early over the Christmas vacation. I agreed, and one of my first assignments was to get ready for a new radiation monitoring system that would be put in place on Jan 1. I was assigned to baby-sit the programmer installing the system on Dec 31, being the most junior member of the team. I arrived at work Dec 31 about 4:00pm, expecting to be there late while things were switched over. Around 8pm all work in the reactor area was stopped, people checked out, and the old system was shut down. The programmer started setting up the new system and transferring data from the old system over, converting it to this "new" database. That database was SQL Server 4.2, running on OS/2 1.3.
At midnight we turned on the system, and a few workers started to use it. It promptly crashed. We rebooted the server, it ran about 30 minutes, and crashed again. We couldn't roll back to the old system since it was now illegal to use, and we didn't have a working system.
That next week was interesting, with 4 of us on the IT staff baby-sitting this server, which needed constant reboots. One of our staff was pregnant and assigned to handle daily duties, while the rest of us basically worked 8 hours on, 8 hours off. With a 45 minute commute to work, I didn't do much more than drive home, shower, sleep, and come back. I logged 100+ hours a week for the month of Jan, moving into Feb. In that time I also learned a lot about OS/2 and SQL Server. We upgraded through 4.2, 4.2a, and 4.2b for SQL Server and moved to OS/2 1.3 and then OS/2 2.1. Those upgrades provided a little stability and we managed to lower our hours to a more reasonable 60-70 hours a week.
During that time I read all the SQL Server manuals, learned how to analyze the server, even how to contact other SQL Servers linked to ours through the probe account. I taught myself quite a bit about SQL Server.
It was during this time that I met my first real DBA. The company hired a full-time DBA to work on SQL Server and get the server stable. He spent a lot of time at our station and I asked him question after question. He upgraded us to Windows 3.1 Advanced Server and taught me about keys, referential integrity, indexing for performance, and more. He also let me know that he was being paid $90k a year in 1992 for his work.
I'd enjoyed DBA work much more than system administration over the first few months of 1992 and taught myself a lot of SQL Server. During this time I was offered a position as an application developer using FoxPro. I took it, and continued to develop against SQL Server, the mainframe the company had, and Oracle databases. I began to expand my knowledge of relational databases, and learned a lot. I transitioned to Visual FoxPro and it was time to move on.
I applied for a few DBA jobs, and ended up getting one that was an IT manager for a small company that used SQL Server 4.2, and was transitioning their homegrown application to SQL Server from FoxPro. It was a good fit, and I learned a lot about business and managing projects in that job. I stayed there for 4 years until I again felt the urge to move on, driven by the Internet boom.
We decided to move one fall after 14 straight days of rain in my native Virginia. My wife had been working from home for a few years, and so it was up to me to find a new job. We'd both traveled for work to various clients and conferences and a few cities in the Western US called to us. Denver was our top choice, and I began searching for a job. I found a similar job to the one I'd been doing, senior DBA at a small firm that also needed some systems help. I flew out, was offered the job, and planned on moving a month later.
I came out alone in Feb of 1999 and found myself in charge of another DBA as well as in charge of systems. I learned that SQL Server 6.5 under load wasn't very stable and found myself digging into many new issues on this platform. After 2 years of fighting daily fires, upgrading to SQL 7 and Windows 2000 for selected systems, and having spent many nights sleeping on the floor of my office, I moved on.
This time I was strictly looking to be a DBA and found myself at another startup, employee 21 at IQDestination, a learning company. That fit well with my skills and interests, having been writing for a few years and publishing short articles. I'd started writing for Swynk the year before, and enjoyed the publishing business. While I was at this job, Swynk was sold and SQLServerCentral was born.
Working at a startup, wearing a few hats, and trying to develop software on a regular basis was interesting and enabled me to find lots to write about. Answering questions on the SSC forums built my skills further, and helped me at work. It was a great position, and there was a time when I was thinking of asking my boss to work part-time, 3 days a week, and working on SSC 2 days a week. It seemed possible.
Until my company folded.
We knew sales were down, but it was one Thursday that I was called into a meeting with a few other senior IT employees and management. We were literally down to a few weeks of money and our owners were begging for more capital. We were told to be on call for the weekend. Sunday we were called to say that we needed to disable all accounts and come in to work to start shutting down equipment. We literally moved dozens of machines out the door on Sunday to various people's houses as our owner didn't think that the landlord would let him back in when they were told the company was shutting down.
This was 2001 and it was a low point for me. I was a top-notch DBA, I knew a ton about SQL Server, but I couldn't find a job. I had a one-year old daughter, and spent 9 weeks at home, looking for jobs, getting few interviews, and caring for kids. It seemed that all my career efforts had been in vain. Finally I was offered a job at JD Edwards, for more money than I would have taken. That was interesting because they later told me they didn't think it was enough.
After working at JDE for a bit over a year, they were purchased by Peoplesoft. It seemed that the economy and sales were striking again. I had my resume together and started sending it out, in anticipation of being let go. I wasn't, and in fact received a promotion to manage 10 DBAs for all of the Peoplesoft production systems. I also got a great raise, from $86k a year to $88k a year.
Needless to say I was less than excited. More work, back to regular fire fighting, and lots, and lots of phone calls. Between most of my team being in CA and issues with systems, I was literally on the phone 6-8 hours a day. It was a challenge only in that I had to manage keeping batteries charged in my headset and cell phone.
I was sending out resumes regularly when things at SQLServerCentral changed. Andy, Brian, and I were all sharing the duties of running the site. We'd continued to evolve the site over the past 2 years and were making money on the site. However it was also a burden to us, all working full-time jobs. We were considering selling the site when we closed a big advertising deal with Quest in early 2003. They paid us for a year of advertising all at once, which gave us a nice cushion of money. After a few debates over the phone, we decided that one of us would need to manage the site full time if we didn't sell. Since my wife was working and provided me with benefits (medical, etc.), I was the best choice.
So in April or May of 2003 I left my job and started running SSC full-time. At first I took some consulting jobs as well, thinking that I'd need to fill my time and continue to work on SQL Server. That ended quickly as we started up Database Weekly (then Database Daily) and the site continued to grow. By keeping active in the forums, I continued to learn and grow my SQL skills.
The Voice of the DBA
It was at this time the editorials started. We use to run an advertisement in that spot, or announce something like the PASS conference. However as I tried to vary the content, I became bored with simple advertising-type content and started writing about SQL Server and things I thought were interesting. I had no idea that the editorials were interesting until Nov of that year when I got to the PASS Summit. Quite a few people complemented me on the editorials, and I knew that was something I'd be doing for a long time.
I continued running SSC until the summer of 2006 when Red Gate software approached us about purchasing the site. They did, and I went to work for them that November. I've been doing that ever since.
In the years since I left full-time technical work, I've kept myself involved with SQL Server in a number of ways. Constantly answering questions on the forums, often having to research an answer, had helped keep me aware of the product. I read a lot of articles on SQL Server, and I've written a few books and tech edited others. Those activities have continued my journey as a SQL Server professional.
That's my journey, and hopefully a few of you found it interesting. I am not tagging anyone since, well, it's not really something I like to do.
You can read Part I here.
I've actually been meaning to write about my journey as a SQL Server professional, but kept putting it off. I was finally "tagged" by Jacob Sebastian, so I decided to make my entry. I'm not a huge fan of being tagged, but I'll participate in this one. I tend to write what I'm inspired by, not by challenges. That being said, these can be fun in the community.
I have a long journey, so I've split this into two parts. Today I'll look at my early development and education, and tackle my career tomorrow.
My interest in computers started when I was young, maybe 11 or 12. My brother and I saw a Vic-20 computer in a store somewhere. We were captivated and begged my Mom to buy one. It was rare to get her to actually spend money on anything that might be construed as a toy, but she must have had some vision of it being a tool and agreed to buy it.
We got it home, with it's cassette tape storage device, and my brother and I proceeded to play a few games on it. That got boring pretty quickly, especially compared to our Atari video system, and I decided to make it do my bidding. Using some sample code, I began to write programs, learning how to make it respond to input from the keyboard, arrow keys, and build simple games that we could play. I learned to program in computations, like PI, and more importantly, allow it to store data that I could recall later. I know I built some early science programs to help with school work.
A few years later I'd moved on to an Apple II. Actually it was a compatible, and acquired through a combination of working and saving my own money and begging for funds again.
This was a real computer, one that had a disk drive (single 5.25") and color graphics. A couple of my friends had them and we traded games, cracked them where we could to remove copy protection, and even edit the text at times to display different headings and labels in games.
This was the machine that taught me truly how to program, with AppleBasic, allowing us to write more complicated games. We wrote our own Dungeons and Dragons simulator as well as additional programs for school. I was lucky enough to take a programming class in early high school and learned how to PEEK and POKE around memory on this machine. It was exciting, and the best part was it taught me how to type fast.
Typing was a combination of waiting until the last minute to finish off papers that I could print at school and accidentally formatting more than a few disks that contained my assignments. I learned how to rebuild programs from memory very quickly.
I started college with every intention of majoring in computer science. I'd taken an AP computer class with Radio Shack TRS-80 computers and learned PASCAL. In addition to learning about sorting, pointers, recursion, and more, I realized the the power of flat files for storing data allowed me to handle larger loads of data and perform analysis. No one wants to type data in every time they run the program.
When visiting a friend at Dartmouth, they'd all been given a brand new Macintosh computer in 1984. It sparked my imagination and I could only dream about what might be possible in the next few years.
At college I spent a year and a half learning LISP, APL, Fortran, and Assembler in various mainframe and mini-computers. This was the age of time sharing computers, and we had to travel to labs around campus to get our assignments done. That meant we were limited in the times that we could work, and also the time allotted. Our accounts were limited to xx minutes of CPU time per semester, so some level of efficiency was required.
We also had a central printing room in one building. We would submit print jobs, and then go pick them up from a series of bins labeled A, B, C, etc. Your printout would have a page with your student account name on it in the bin that was labeled with the first letter of your last name.
My first two years of college were at Syracuse University in the mid 80s. This was the end of the cold war, but when I entered college many people were looking forward to working in the defense industry or in a government think tank, both of which had the best chance for someone to play with the latest technology.
It was also the Wall Street era, and I found many of my programming classes too easy. Between the cold winters in upstate New York and the lure of making money in the Big Apple, I transferred to the University of Virginia and changed my major to economics. The next two years of my life were spent digging into accounting, finance, and economics, with every intention of going to work for a large bank or brokerage when I graduated.
My senior year of college started out great. I had a high GPA (3.8), had done well in my classes and was working on lining up interviews as I polished my resume. Life was good as I went to play rugby on the first Saturday in October. We hadn't lined up an opponent this week, so we arranged a scrimmage within the team. I had been playing scrum half, and picked up the ball early in the game and headed around the right side, trying to outdistance my opposing scrum half, who was chasing me from behind.
He caught me with a high tackle, both of us landing on my left shoulder. I knew something was wrong when I couldn't lift my arm after getting up. I guess there was pain, but it was the lack of mobility that bothered me. Someone walked me to the medical center where I had my favorite jersey cut off me and I was examined. A grade III separated shoulder was the diagnosis.
I'd worked for an orthopedic surgeon in high school, so I accepted a brace, walked home and got in my car and headed back to Virginia Beach. I enjoyed the weekend with a few friends and a few more beers before seeing my former employer on Monday. He recommended against surgery after a couple days, and said it would heal, but it would take time.
That was the first really bad injury of my life. While I'd had sprains and pains over the years, this was the first time I as out of action for more than a month. In all, I wore a shoulder brace pretty much 24 hours a day for 12 weeks. A lot of sponge baths, learning to take notes with my right hand (I'm left handed), and some oral exams gave me a new perspective on life. I didn't pursue interviews or a career and focused on getting healthy.
It was April before I could do a push-up, and my only interest in computers was how they could make it easier for me to finish the various essays and papers I'd been assigned. I graduated and left school, heading back to Virginia Beach and another summer job of tending bar.
As much as I enjoyed working in a nightclub, as the summer moved on I became a bit bored. With nothing to look forward to in September, I was a little worried. One of my co-workers was taking classes in Electrical Engineering at the time, and due to finish the next year. He'd been working on his degree for 6 years, and I felt a little guilty for finishing my degree and not using it. I decided to enroll in the local community college and at least start working on a technical degree. A recession was looming, Wall Street wasn't looking attractive, so I went back to school.
I spent a year at community college beefing up my electronic skills, studying physics, and taking C. It had been 3 or 4 years since I'd programmed a computer and C was both refreshing and challenging to me. We wrote a word processor that gave me fits in managing large, complex strings. After that year I decided to pursue a masters in Electrical Engineering, thinking it was a good, practical field.
Another year at Old Dominion University had me working with computers more than I expected and after finding myself in the computer lab helping the staff upgrade from Sun OS to Solaris one weekend, I switched to Computer Engineering.
Everything was going well and as I approached my last year of full-time study, I decided to take an internship over the summer. That was the start of my career, and I'll cover that in Part 2.
I read Jack Corbett's blog entry,No Training Budget Still No Excuse, last week and thought it was excellent. In fact, I plan on putting it out again on Twitter again today.It was that good to me, and I thought it was short, to the point and had good suggestions. And not just because he mentioned SQL Server Central.
There is no excuse for you not to be able to improve your skills and career.
I hear lots of times from people that they work too much, don't have a training budget, and how are they supposed to improve their skills. The short answer is that you work at it. On a regular basis, and using the resources you have. Jack gives some great ones, but the reality is that there are plenty more, in any field, on the Internet that will help you improve. They don't take a lot of time, but I'm sure some of you can find an hour or two a few times a week to learn something new about your profession.
Doctors do it, lawyers do it, even engineers often spend some time out of work studying and reading about their field. There's no reason that other professions can't do it as well. It doesn't have to be every day, but it should be every week. Spend a few minutes learning something new.
Some of the resources are free, some aren't. However don't let price scare you. You ought to invest a little in your career yourself, even if your employer won't. You might not be able to afford a $2,000 class or conference, but I'm sure you can buy a book, or get a subscription to some service that helps you.
My current career is dedicated to providing free (cost) learning resources for IT professionals. I also have a business that looks to provide pay services. I think they both fit needs, and we try to ensure that we are providing more value for the paid services, but that doesn't mean the free ones won't help you. They might take more time, and more work on your side, but that's the tradeoff.
No matter how you choose to do it, there isn't an excuse to not improve your career.
It's hard to actually put a specific value on networking, and I've been skeptical of it in the past. However as I've learned a bit more from Andy Warren's investigations into the process, and I've thought about my career, I think it works. I'm not sure I've gotten a lot of financial value out of it, but I think that I have gotten some things.
Let me give you an example. I hear about jobs all the time, and surprisingly, many of them are not because I run SQLServerCentral. Quite a few come from recruiters who are trying to get me to take a new job so they can get paid. No problem in that, but I have the best job in the world, so I typically don't respond. However I do see jobs in places where I have friends, and I've forwarded them on. I know at least a couple of people have gotten work from those postings, and I've at least gotten some goodwill.
This November, at the PASS Summit, Don Gabor is putting on a networking session, actually a few of them, to teach people about networking. I'll be attending the Networking to Build Business Contacts to see if I can learn anything. It's $60, and if I learn something that gets me one hour of work, one tech editing contract, it will have been worth it.
Most of us are geeks, not naturally outgoing, or even if we are, not necessarily driven to use that to further our careers. This didn't seem like a great idea when I first heard of it, but I've become more convinced as I've talked to Andy about it, and I realize this is the type of non-technical skill, a communication skill, that many of us sorely need.
Space is limited, but if you want to build your career in more ways than just technically, I'd urge you to think about it. And please stop me and say "hi" at anytime during the PASS conference if you attend.
No.
Blogging is not for everyone and you don't want to give the impression you are something you are not doing something right if you don't blog. Not everyone is a writer, not everyone likes putting their thoughts down, and not everyone is brave enough to publish out on the Internet.
It takes a thick skin, and even after doing this for years, I still get attacked regularly, and I don't always take it well. I'll admit it gets to me. Luckily I have a good support system with my wife and friends that can pick me up when I've had a particularly nasty comment.
I do a presentation on The Modern Resume, telling people how to big a more noticeable presence in the world, making yourself stand out more. I think blogging is the easy way to do this, but there are others:
I don't think you can get away from writing completely since you'll need to document and explain things you've done. However it can be as simple as notes you've made to yourself and a few lines on your resume or CV.
Writing is a skill, however, and I'd encourage you to develop it. If you don't want to blog, it still makes sense to pay attention to how you communicate in email, in reports, and in documentation. Learn to do it better and your career will benefit.
In my Modern Resume presentation, I tried to structure it to go from easy to hard things to do in terms of branding yourself. So the order has been:
Actually I added research later, so that is at the end when it really is the easiest (I think) for people to do. Or maybe not. It requires some confidence in yourself to admit mistakes and ignorance, so maybe it’s not easy.
At a recent presentation I was discussing this with Andy Warren and he disagreed. He said blogging was hard for most people, that they can’t maintain it and my bias as a writer has me spending too much time on it.
I think I agree after some thought on the matter. Writing is hard for many people, and even though they recognize that it’s a skill they need to IT (writing, communicating), most people won’t do it any more than they have to.
So what is the correct order? How should I focus on them in my presentation? I think for the average guy/gal, the easiest things are likely :
I’ll play with the order, but I am interested to see what others think. My view is that speaking and authoring, trying to put out a message, is still hard, but volunteering your time and knowledge, either in IT or outside, is probably easier than blogging. Even leadership, being a team lead or project lead, is probably easier for most IT people.
I read SQLBatman's post about his first week as an MVP, and it really resonated well with me. I think that he really hit it when he said that he wasn't going to sit around, he was going to go look for information and take things back from the opportunity he had.
That's really what separates many people in their careers. Sure some people are smarter, some learn quicker, or just "get" how things work in their profession. But most of the really successful people take advantage of their opportunities.
They work at things.
They don't get more chances, they look for the ones that are out there and take advantage of them.
Someone tagged me, and I’ve lost the email in all the pile up from vacation where I was very, very unwired from work, despite being wired to the world. Actually I’ll make that one my first thing:
Not quit, not stop progressing on something or giving up, but knowing how to take a break, regular breaks. Early in my career I worked lots of extra hours, partially to impress people, partially to learn, and partially because I thought I might miss something and I had time. That’s probably part of being young, but I wish that I’d still learned to take my vacation, enjoy it, and make more time for things outside of work.
My wife taught me this.
Throughout most of my life before 32 or 33 years old, I took jobs as they were offered. I looked for new opportunities, but I worried about the opportunity and almost solely the opportunity (the challenge, the size of the database, etc.).
As a result in interviews I worried, I studied and crammed and tried to be the “perfect employee,” answering their questions, not asking many of my own and giving them no reason to avoid offering me a job.
Looking back I wish I’d interviewed the companies harder. I wished I’d been looking for jobs before I needed them, been more discriminating, talked to more people in the company, and really pushed them to match my needs as much as I tried to match theirs.
I learned this when I took a job to move to CO that really wrecked a good portion of my life and I quit. I slept in my office a half dozen times the first year, had bad management, and while I learned a lot, I think I could have done better. I’ve done this well for the last 8 or 9 years.
Some of this requires that you succeed in your own life and career, but I think that along the way you should be looking for ways go give back to the community.
Early in my career I was never that interested in participating in user groups, and I often let people stumble more to figure out their own solutions instead of speaking up and giving them more of a helping hand. Over the years, I’ve learned I should have done more to help others along the way, and give back as I could.
This is more of a business item, but I wish I’d learned earlier to focus on what I wanted to succeed in and play my game instead of trying so hard to please others. Not sure I’ve completely learned to do this, but I wish I’d have had someone to teach me this early on.
Thanks to Andy Warren for this one.
I have no idea who’s been tagged, so I’ll just leave this off here.
Yesterday I wrote about some goals for 2009 here at SQLServerCentral. It’s a list of stuff that I want to accomplish in 2009. However I didn’t give any way to determine if I’m successful in meeting the goals. I guess you could say that getting to the goals is the best way to measure things, but I think that I could get close in some areas and call things a success. Or at least a reasonable attempt.
For example, I would like to get 400 posts a month. That was a goal in 2008 and I didn’t make it every month, but I did get 4800+ for the year. Is that a success? I think so. What if I got to 350 a month, was that an honest effort? I think that would be my line for miserable failure if I can’t get an average of 350 a month.
So with that in mind: (answers in italics)
I think these are pretty good measures, though I’d be curious to see what people think of them.
I saw this blog from Jeffrey Yao on investing in your career, and thought it would be a great editorial. It echoes a lot of what I’ve written in the past, you can’t know everything, but you have to keep doing it.
I like his advice, and while I’m not sure in which order I’d invest in those things (likely an “it depends” scenario), I do think that he has three important ways to look at your learning.
I also wouldn’t recommend, or have anyone blogging, that they are learning or doing something so they have more free time. If you are making more time for work, then you should be moving your investment into areas that will help you company.
I’ve been trying the social networking thing, with accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. I guess I have one on Plaxo, but I never use it unless someone wants to connect to me. There’s nothing really wrong with Plaxo, but I kind of got stuck on Linked In and see no reason to change.
FYI, we have a SQLServerCentral LinkedIn group if you’d like to join.
However tracking what I posted and friends posted hasn’t been easy. I have to refresh the pages on the web, and I constantly forget to do that. As much as I don’t want to be too distracted, I do like to glance over there.
So when I saw FriendFeed, I wanted to give it a try. It seemed like a good idea, grabbing all my accounts, including my Picasa account, and consolidating things into one interface. I signed up, included my accounts, and for a few days I liked the real-time update window that I kept up behind other windows. It refreshed automatically and I could see what was happening.
However as I added a few people on Twitter to follow, I noticed that their updates weren’t appearing on my FriendFeed. I searched around, but the minimalist design of Friendfeed made it hard for me to figure out what’s working or not. And I couldn’t find an easy way to add more people to my feed without inviting them, which is a somewhat intrusive thing to do.
So after a couple weeks, I’ve given up on Friendfeed. My laptop has a Vista Gadget on the side that tracks Twitter updates, but I’m searching for one on XP. I’ve just started using Twitterlicious and I’ll post a review on that next week.
One interesting thing about doing the podcasts and working from home is that I tend to shave a bit more often. I’m not overly concerned about my appearance, but I tend to look pretty bad on video if I haven’t shaved in the last 24 hours.
So my routine on video days, usually 2-3 times a week, is to run before lunch, shower, shave, and then shoot video.
I almost feel like I’m back in an office with all the razor work.
There's a lot to it, but I see Tim Ford has a nice blog post on what it means to be a professional.
While I agree that we want to continue to learn and share what we know, I'm not sure it implies that we definitely know what we are doing. Rather I think it means that we strive to use best practices, we strive to constantly do a better job with better being defined as something of higher quality than a layman would achieve.
And to me that means that the PASS Summit, SQL Saturday, and other events are a part of a professional's lives. Not all of them, but some of them.
You don't have to try to be a professional in all aspects of your life, but in your career, I would hope that you would.
I had an interesting question from someone that I respect and I’ve seen answering questions and writing a few articles on the WWW. This person asked if there was any point in them doing a presentation at the PASS Summit or some other event since most of their knowledge was already available on the Internet in posts or in a couple articles.
There is always something to be gained from doing a talk on something, even if you’ve written about it. How many people out there that are speakers go onstage and talk about their books? Quite a few, and I’ve seen some of them and their talks give you a bit more insight into what they wrote, and they touch people that would never read a book.
Most people are beginners, and even if you are one of the most widely known authors on the Internet, say a Kalen Delaney, there are plenty of people that have not read your work. Giving a talk touches new people that either haven’t had time or interest, or just didn’t see your work on the Internet.
If you have some talent, and an inclination, go for it. Speak at a user group and see how it goes. If it’s well received, then you’ll know that you have some talent for speaking and presenting, and it’s worth pursuing a bit more.
And most companies I know support this. It gives them some exposure and it’s a bit of a bragging point to their clients. They can show they have talented people in the company that give back to others.
