August 16, 2018 at 9:17 pm
Comments posted to this topic are about the item The Best Days
August 16, 2018 at 11:28 pm
A long time ago I was lamenting on this site about how employers did not want to employ an old person (then somewhere in the 50's) like me. Well, I think I must say that the best day in my work life was when at the age of 58 I got a new job at a company that pays me a decent salary. Thank you Steve for this forum where we can post our laments and joys.
:-PManie Verster
Developer
Johannesburg
South Africa
I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. - Holy Bible
I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times. - Everett Mckinley Dirkson (Well, I am trying. - Manie Verster)
August 17, 2018 at 2:06 am
The wins always seem quite small. For me stuff like helping my employee get a visa to live here in the UK is great. To be able to change someone's life for the better, it means a lot to me. Getting software released is good but we don't really uncork the champers or anything. It's more crawling home exhausted for a curry knowing how much more work there will be to make things actually work as needed. Reaching salary milestones is obviously also good but doesn't really give the same satisfaction - for me.
As much as anything I like it when a plan comes together quickly and painlessly and everything works as I intended with no significant rework. Happened yesterday as it goes, hopefully at least once a week though!
August 17, 2018 at 2:25 am
call.copse - Friday, August 17, 2018 2:06 AMThe wins always seem quite small. For me stuff like helping my employee get a visa to live here in the UK is great. To be able to change someone's life for the better, it means a lot to me. Getting software released is good but we don't really uncork the champers or anything. It's more crawling home exhausted for a curry knowing how much more work there will be to make things actually work as needed. Reaching salary milestones is obviously also good but doesn't really give the same satisfaction - for me.As much as anything I like it when a plan comes together quickly and painlessly and everything works as I intended with no significant rework. Happened yesterday as it goes, hopefully at least once a week though!
You need to stop and smell the coffee (roses) my friend. Good things happen around you and you do not even know about it. I see this as being on auto pilot. I was there and it is not as if I sit and laze around all day but you need to take it all in. Stop and take a deep breath then carry on.
:-PManie Verster
Developer
Johannesburg
South Africa
I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. - Holy Bible
I am a man of fixed and unbending principles, the first of which is to be flexible at all times. - Everett Mckinley Dirkson (Well, I am trying. - Manie Verster)
August 17, 2018 at 3:26 am
Think one of my best days was in my first full cycle DR test and everything from the DB side of things was up and running by the end of the first day, and all ready for the users by lunch on the second. There's a huge feeling of achievement to get an entire company's data restored and in a usable state within about 24 hours; and not to mention a huge sigh of relief, as a DR test that fails is terrifying. There were certainly still lessons learned still though, but it was a great success and great team work from everyone involved.
I feel that if I ever come out of a DR test and don't think I've learned something I'd think that something went wrong; there are always efficiencies to be made and skills to be gained in other areas to aid the business as a whole get back online. yes I went in prepared, but I would say we've way more prepared than we were then now, and that's always a bonus. 🙂
Thom~
Excuse my typos and sometimes awful grammar. My fingers work faster than my brain does.
Larnu.uk
August 17, 2018 at 3:58 am
As I posted on the worst day thread about the ransomware attack the opposite of the best days / week / months was:
August 17, 2018 at 4:01 am
For me, it was the day after weeks of trying to make service broker, NoSQL and a petabyte sql server system deliver a system that exceeded everything our internal customers wanted... and we all relaxed our back muscles and stopped clenching our teeth
MVDBA
August 17, 2018 at 5:22 am
It is true that we tend to remember the bad days more easily than the good ones. In my case, I believe it's mainly because I have had many good days but only a few bad ones.
Anyway, I think the best days at work have been the ones, when I have managed to come up with ideas during disaster recovery situations; or have been able to think out of the box and implement solutions, which made drastic improvements. One that I would like to mention is the first one where I stepped up to lead on a project that was termed as 'Lost Battle'.
There was a client of ours which went into a big mess due to a mistake of one of our DBAs. To come up with a solution to clean and correct the mess in Inventory and Accounts, with 100% satisfaction took me 2 months, as the client's team continued to use the system while we were attempting to apply fixes. But the end results, changed my level of confidence and opened up doors that I had not even imagined.
I believe accomplishing what you think you can, despite the odds, becomes memorable more than anything else. Because that's when you have won, for yourself.
August 17, 2018 at 6:25 am
Manie Verster - Thursday, August 16, 2018 11:28 PMA long time ago I was lamenting on this site about how employers did not want to employ an old person (then somewhere in the 50's) like me. Well, I think I must say that the best day in my work life was when at the age of 58 I got a new job at a company that pays me a decent salary. Thank you Steve for this forum where we can post our laments and joys.
I love to see posts like this. Nice one.
August 17, 2018 at 7:16 am
My best days are reflective of the people around me:
* Every day someone I supervised received a promotion.
* The days when all people and all systems were working exactly as intended, and my presence was irrelevant.
* The one day where everything hit the fan and the team just figured it out without bothering me. Even though I was one room over.
Now that I think about it, the worst days were reflective of the people around me too...
August 17, 2018 at 7:44 am
I like this post idea. Good news is sometimes hard to come by.
I have spent my career in roles mixed between development and administration. I have to say that my proudest moments have come from the administrative side. In particular: troubleshooting an issue, identifying the root cause, and prescribing the necessary fix. This is especially true with performance complaints. I have talked to customers with confidence in my approach to talk them off the cliff of throwing our software out a window and buying a competitor. It does always turn out this way but the great moments I remember are some of these support incidents where I "saved the day".
August 17, 2018 at 8:21 am
The days in which I was able to take a process that were running for hours in production and get them to run in just minutes or less.
The days I'm able to help someone out with a problem they are dealing with, my coworkers or those on this site.
The day I landed my current job after being transitioned out after 25+ years at my prior job. "Back in the saddle again" was what I started singing.
Non work best days, well.. every vacation day!! 😀
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we travel not to escape life but for life not to escape us
Don't fear failure, fear regret.
August 17, 2018 at 8:21 am
Its funny, but you're right Steve. I can't remember the good days as well as I do the bad days. I believe it is a part of the nature of what we do. Ours careers, whether operations or development, is one of "no news is good news". No one comes to my office to tell me what a great job I'm doing. No one in operations or development is ever nominated for employee of the month. We only know we're doing good due to the lack of attention.
So, for me some good days have been those in which we've had a successful deployment of a new system we've worked on. And the users use it without issue.
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
August 17, 2018 at 9:02 am
Since we have to do diffent tasks (or little steps toward this tasks) every day, a good day would be the wrong measurement. When I have a big tasks that takes me x days and went fine, than I have x mediocre to good days. On the other hand, when I have only small tasks, than I have a good hour, than a neutral hour, a good hour again and maybe a not so good or dull hour. How should I aggregate this day? Should I use SUM() or AVG()?
A golden hour was, when I was assigned a difficult task (several days estimated) and find out, that it is very easy to do, because I made it implicid or explicid possible, when I wrote that code 2 years ago (but could not remind), so that I could do the job within a few minutes...
God is real, unless declared integer.
August 17, 2018 at 9:43 am
Almost all the days I spent as a programmer / developer were good days.
For the first 10 years of my career I was one of only two programmers in the company. (She did programming for the finance dept, I did programming for all the other depts.) I was able to help lots of people by automating lots of tasks, and was able to make some really excellent changes in the company's processes, saving time and money. And for that I got lots of Glory, and lots of raises. (4 salary increases in one year ... 1999 was a great year 🙂 Life marches on though, the company got bought out, all the programming work got sent overseas, the programming work dried up, so I joined the DBA group.
There's not a lot of glory to be had being a DBA ...
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