There are a lot of technology people looking for jobs these days, especially after all the layoffs that have occurred in 2023. At the same time, I have a number of friends and clients that are struggling to hire qualified people. They get lots of candidates, but they are dismayed at how little the candidates they interview seem to know, or at least how little candidates know in the areas that their organization has needs.

Today, I want to help people get better at growing and managing their careers. Therefore I'm asking those of you that are employed to describe your job. Give us your title in the comments and then list 5-10 things that you've done lately. What types of queries have you written? What tasks did you complete with SQL Server or Azure SQL? Have you needed to research something to solve a problem? What knowledge or concepts helped you complete a task?

The idea is to share some of the skills or concepts a person should have to grow their career. Hopefully, some people will then read descriptions and build skills from this list. They'll try to accomplish the tasks you've had to finish, hopefully documenting or blogging about their work.

As an example, I'll give a few tech things I've seen lately from clients. These are practical things someone needed to finish, or something they asked someone else to do.

I was working with a client and there was a need to find all the logins whose passwords were not set to expire. How can you do that?

Another had a table had a lot of duplicate data, and all duplicates but the row with the latest date needed to be deleted. What does the DELETE statement look like? Caveat, what if I need to update all but the first row (newest) with a new value in some column to mark them as inactive?

A client needed to get a list of all the servers from their central management server (CMS) and then extract that list as a CSV file. They were using this for some audit purposes.

At another client, a developer needed to clone a git repository and then open the .sql files in Azure Data Studio. Can you show how to do this?

A DBA wanted to decide whether you choose a clustered or non-clustered index for a table that contains sales information and is often queried for a few rows based on a date. Why would one index be better than the other?

Don't answer these questions, as this is homework for others. However, if you could share a list of things you would expect your new coworker to know or solve, that will help us raise the bar for what we expect from our colleagues.