In my Modern Resume presentation I have a few slides on blogging, a couple of which are hints and tips on "how to blog." The second one starts out like this:
I know that repeating something three times is supposed to be a way to get people to remember something. This is one of those things that I think is really important to stress to people, especially after a few incidents in the SQL world lately.
Joe Webb recently wrote "The theft of ideas and content" after some of his content was plagiarized. I've seen a few other professionals in this the SQL Server world respond to similar issues of their own content. A couple professionals, Brent Ozar and Tom LaRock did a short presentation on how to deal with this.
You can't build a brand of your own if you don't do the work. It sounds cliche, it sounds like the advice you'd get from your parents. Do the right thing no matter what. Lots of people think that everyone lies on their resume, and I'm sure many do, but it can come by to bite you later. Here are six examples of people who lied on their resume and got caught.
In today's world, it's getting easier and easier to check up on plagiarism. I strongly urge you to do your own work.
Your blog is a part of your resume. It's a part of what people will look at before they call you for an interview. Even after you have the job, this survey said you might get fired if they discover you lied on your resume.
I don't know that I'd fire someone for lying on their resume, but I certainly would if I found you copying someone's blog and claiming it as your own.
I saw an article from Certification Magazine recently (via Trainsignal on twitter) with that title. It compared the completion of certification to that of a marathon runner. You've completed a marathon, after all the training, and now what?I'm not sure that's a great comparison, but it does beg the question of what to do when you've completed your MCITPro, MCSE, or any other certification.Surprisingly, I found quite a few other articles with that same title, and I thought this one from the MD Dept of Transportation was great. It talks about what companies that get certified to do business with the state should do, and it really lets you know that certification is the first step, not the last one.Their advice?
Is it any different for individual workers? I'd argue that it's not, and you should view a certification as the base step for moving your career forward. Whether you are coming out of college, or a twenty year veteran in your industry, the certification can add to your credentials, but it's just an addition, it isn't the ultimate goal or measure of your value.I think certifications can help. They force you to learn something, and they help you to focus in certain areas. I'm sure there are plenty of people that just try to memorize topics and answers, but that should still help them. Whether they'll be able to apply those skills in the real world is a separate question, but they still have improved skills. And that's what you also need to do. In addition to just marketing yourself, and showing off your certification, you also want to show that you've learned a few things. Blog and relate your studying back to your job, or to something in that area. I'd argue you should have been doing this all along, but it's never too late. Pick up a project of some sort, even if you just duplicate some work of someone else. Show that you have picked up skills and can start to apply them. Make a point of communicating that you can apply your skills. And if you can't do that, perhaps that's the next step for you. Learn to apply those skills and don't assume that certification will carry you along.
If you own a business, I believe that you have a right to make more money than the rest of your employees. You are taking on a risk, and greater risk should result in greater reward, at least that’s how capitalism is supposed to work.
But what about management? Often I see management (meaning directors, VPs, C-level) having different bonus plans than employees. They have different targets, which makes sense, but also different measures. As a result, management often gets bonuses when employees do not.
I think this is a huge mistake. It contributes to a lack of loyalty from employees, they don’t trust management, don’t see them as leaders, and don’t feel they have a reason to support the company.
In times past, in the military, in companies in the late 1800s, workers had much less power and management took advantage of that. Workers don’t have much more power today, but they have much greater mobility, especially in the technical world. That means that by not creating a more equitable distribution of incentive pay, or bonuses, you are destroying the goodwill you can build with employees.
If you are running a company that deals more with very unskilled labor, say a retail store, then perhaps it doesn’t matter as much. If you have high employee turnover, then perhaps you are not losing much, though I would argue that you could reduce training costs with better retention, and that’s what bonuses give.
I’m getting off track here, but I want to provide a basis for building a better bonus plan.
I think management should have different targets they need to achieve, but these targets much be tightly coupled to those targets for employees. In fact, one of the management bonus targets ought to be that employees get their bonuses. If this measure isn’t achieved, then how is management succeeding? They must be driving employees, who actually do the work, to do a better job, or at least get the best effort out of them.
Management bonuses should be larger, and you can’t do much about the anger there. They take on greater responsibility, arguably greater risk in their career, and should be rewarded, but in determining that reward, it ought to also depend on their subordinates achieving their goals as well.
I worked at a company that had a yearly bonus. Actually I’ve worked at a few companies, but this one in particular set a plan in motion in January of one year. This plan was structured as follows:
I don’t remember the exact targets for xx and yy, but they aren’t important. Most employees I knew thought these were reasonable goals, would require some work, but not an extraordinary effort, and were fair. People were excited, and despite a slow economy at the time (this was around 2002), they worked hard.
Until April.
When we released our Q1 results (we were a public company), we hadn’t had a profitable quarter. Management gave us the usual story about being upbeat, we can still pull together and work hard, and we’ll have a good year.
Anyone want to guess what happened with moral?
Salesman still pushed hard, after all, they have a separate bonus structure called a “commission”. Most of the rest of the company was a little disillusioned. Not that they looked to quit, or stop working, but there wasn’t an incentive to work harder than necessary. Executives were mystified, they pushed harder, complained, and tried to motivate people.
I found out later that executives had a different bonus structure than the rest of the company, which is something else I need to write about in another post. So they were on track to still make bonuses.
Many employees, however, checked out for the year. “We’ll hope for bonuses next year” was the consensus for most people working there. The #3 item for our bonuses had been blown by a bad quarter, which meant that there was no longer an incentive to work harder.
Granted employees owned stock, so they would still get some benefit from a profitable company, but most don’t own enough stock, and tend to hold onto it, so this doesn’t provide any short term incentive.
And that’s what a bonus is, a short term incentive.
What could be done better? First, a bonus should stand on it’s own in a period. Each part of the plan above should have been assigned a percentage of the overall bonus. If we had 1% of our bonus come from each quarter and the other 6% from the first two incentives, people would still be motivated. They’d have lost one part of their bonus, but not all of it.
I also think that having yearly bonuses, the traditional “Christmas bonus” is a mistake. It’s a long time for employees to focus on the incentive, and with the uncertainty in many companies and the lack of loyalty from both sides, it falls out two ways:
In either case you aren’t necessarily building a good business plan.
My thoughts are that you should motivate people in short bursts, provide incentives to change behavior for short terms, make them fair, and change them often.
My wife has had a hard week. Actually a few weeks where she's worked a lot of hours, lots of phone calls, computer work, all trying to get a big contract going with a customer. It's been stressful and hard on her, making her question this job a few times.
Apparently her boss has been paying attention and wants to let her know that he appreciates her and he's aware of how hard things have been. This morning, while Tia was on a conference call, the FedEx guy came and rang the doorbell. He dropped off a small box, about the size that a cell phone comes in. It was from her boss, so I took it in to her.
She opened it up, and inside was an envelope that contained 4 or 5 small chocolate Easter eggs and a handwritten note telling her that he appreciated her hard work and to hang in there as things would slow down soon.
It made her laugh, and made her morning.
That's a great sign that a manager is paying attention to how his direct reports are doing. Even doubly so since she's a remote employee and only sees him a couple of times a year.
I was joking with Buck Woody on Facebook the other day and he mentioned he’d been a data janitor at a few of his jobs. That made me smile since I think that’s been my title at more than a few jobs.
It’s not a put down, but a recognition that I’ve handled quite a few menial, tedious, monotonous parts of being a data guy as a production DBA. I’ve checked on backups, made sure they worked, checked logs, built benchmarks, and other types of fairly boring tasks. Granted I’ve automated quite a few of these so they didn’t take a lot of time, but I haven’t done the sexy, exciting work that I read about from some of the “famous” SQL authors.
Not that I’m complaining. I have typically liked a boring job that I could leave at the end of the day and go home to enjoy time with my family. I’d take that again if I ever leave here.
A great example of how to “Tweet” poorly. This guy got fired before he started work.
Twitter is a series of hallway conversations. I think that’s a great description, and I’ll write more about that at some point. However just like those hallways, you need to be aware that you don’t necessarily know who’s listening. Putting it in writing means it could be overheard by anyone, and send on.
In case you’re interested, here’s the tweet that got him fired.
When I worked at JD Edwards years ago, we were looking for monthly teambuilding exercises that would help our group of 20 stay focused, and ensure we bonded together. We tried a variety of things, we’d plan and discuss ideas at a weekly meeting, and we would rotate the odd-man-out, the person that had to remain in the office to provide coverage.
One of the choices we made was to attend The Matrix Reloaded on opening morning, catching the first show at a local theater. 18 of us car pooled down there one morning, watched the show, and then enjoyed talking about it the next day.
We were geeks. The Matrix was a popular movie, and seeing the sequel gave us a common bond, a point to touch each other, and a shared experience away from work. You might debate how beneficial this is for a company, but I’d argue that these bonds make it easier for people to do favors for each other, help each other out, and they build morale. All of that should help with retention and productivity.
There’s a chance to do this again for many companies in a little over a month. Star Trek has a new movie coming out on May 8th. While the original series, and even The Next Generation have been abandoned as series, there is still a lot of Star Trek fandom in the geek world.
If you have a team of people, consider scheduling a morning out. Grab that 10am show, treat your IT staff (or as many as possible) and give them a chance to grow tighter together as a team.
I saw a great blog post from Brent Ozar about whether or not you are being treated fairly at work. It’s the response to a question asked by Chris Shaw: Are you being treated fairly?
This blog talks about employees being replaceable and references the hospitality industry. That struck a chord with me because I worked in there for a long time as well. And I learned that I not only didn’t want to stick around, but very few people would. I thought it was a bit sad that I had a few friends in their 40s and 50s still tending bar, waiting tables, or doing some other relatively menial job. They were good at it, but it’s a hard life.
I’ve grown up a bit, and I’d retract my sympathy for them. There’s nothing wrong with that (or any other) job where you work and get paid. If you want to do it, and you’re willing to work, you earn your money the same as me.
You are replaceable. Even someone like me, who as the editor of SQLServerCentral, have built a brand that is almost indistinguishable from the site, can be let go and someone else do my job. I’m successful, people identify the site with me, it’s still growing and popular, but I know I could be replaced. It might lose some people, and there might be some short term (or long term) loss of revenue, but it could work.
At least I operate on that principle.
You have to make sure you’re providing value to your company. That’s common advice, and it’s out there. I wrote an editorial at SQLServerCentral on that recently. But the company has to be providing value to you.
In the past most people stuck with a company for a long time. Part of that was the promise of retirement, but some was cultural as well (leaving a job had some stigma) and there weren’t as many new jobs opening up. Skills were less transient between companies as many people were trained to work in that business and not as generally as I think we are now (mostly thanks to computing).
However I’m not sure many companies were fair to employees. That would be an interesting thesis for someone to write.
Today there are more jobs available. Even in this economy, you can still find a new job, though I would be more careful doing so. But the economy will turn around, and you should be positioning yourself to take advantage of that if you cannot find a job now. And if your company is not providing you with values as well.
