January 22, 2024 at 7:44 am
Paul O'Neill (a previous CEO of Alcoa) once mentioned 3 items for successful companies:
Point 2 is counter-productive on the first view. But if you want talented people that enjoy work, then you see the importance of it.
January 22, 2024 at 11:05 am
The linked article is long but well worth reading. A lot of it dovetails with my experiences.
It's one thing to hire a great DBA, data engineer but you really need one who can convince turkeys to vote for Christmas. I had the devil's own job getting a team to adopt git (over dumping stuff in different folders), use code quality tools, use inbuilt cloud logging over a huge role-your-own concoction. This was last year, not some distant 1990s battle. There is only so much that one or two people can do unless the team is held accountable and you can plug the holes in the leaky quality bucket.
Hiring good people is time-consuming and hard. Retaining good people in a bad environment is nigh on impossible.
Firing people is horrible but I've reached the conclusion that it may be necessary where a cultural change is needed. Some people do more than not adapt, they actively obstruct the team from adapting.
January 22, 2024 at 3:50 pm
Agreed, David.
January 29, 2024 at 1:37 pm
On the speaking/blogging side of things, I have a very badly maintained blog that has patches of 2-3 months of being regularly updated and then much longer periods of not being updated at all because other life things get in the way. I've also got a barely existent speaker career, where I've done one reasonable presentation at New Stars of Data and one pretty bad presentation at Data Minutes as well as a couple of user group presentations.
Despite neither being at all impressive, the blog goes on my CV and it has a link to the video of my New Stars of Data talk, and both of these have actively helped me get the last 2 jobs I've had. I guess my point is you don't have to be one of the big names in the community for these things to make a difference.
January 30, 2024 at 10:14 pm
These things made a big difference in my career before SQL Server Central. Answering questions elsewhere, doing a talk at a UG, they helped me stand out as well. You certainly don't need to be a big name.
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