Steve Jones has asked for some folks in the community to talk about what it’s like to work in our field across four posts. So how do I talk about my job across four job posts? If you didn’t read part 1, you can click here to read about what the day to day is like.
My four series post is structured as:
- Day to day, what is normal? What are 95% of my experiences?
- Best days ever, these are the highlights.
- Worst days ever, these don’t happen all of the time and this is what nightmares are made out of.
- Weird days, Brent Ozar said it best when he said Database Administration is weird.
The best days ever for a DBA.
I should preface that you should have some passion or interest in technology if you are getting into IT. You can find some jobs where the duties and technology will never change. It will be the same forever, typically those are places that move slowly and they don’t need to innovate. These sites just need to keep their service afloat. Those are not the most common for IT, but those places do exist.
I wanted to bring that up because you are probably going to have to keep learning. Would you make your primary doctor someone who graduated 40 years ago and hasn’t learned anything new since then? Why would you hire a DBA then that hasn’t learned anything new or progressed either?
Some employers grant time to help their people grow during business hours, but this is not consistent. So when you find an employer that does allow this, consider this a perk. If you don’t have that perk, you may consider using a percentage of your own time to study and learn. (You may consider this even if you do have that perk!)
Most days are average and you do roughly the same rotation of tasks over a period of time. If you enjoy that type of work, then every day is going to be a pretty good day. It can get dull, but that’s why you have better than average days and also worse than average days.
The best days for me are when: I get to learn, I receive that “aha!” moment, or I get to interface with other knowledgeable professionals.
As I prefaced, not every employer grants you dedicated time to learn. So when an employer does allocate a few hours a month for me to learn or create something to learn that will better the company, those days are awesome.
The most recent and interesting project was to figure out a beneficial way to incorporate Change Tracking. One of my favorite past projects was to learn how Transactional Replication works and create a new database as a service offering from that. Most of these projects are given with light direction. I’m given the end goal and I need to get us from A to B in the most reliable and practical way possible. If that means I need to do some research into various technologies / methods, then I may do so. Getting to really dig in with research and creative approaches is an incredibly satisfying and fun experience. To be able to architect a solution from start to finish is a huge task, but it’s one of those things I love to do.
A lot of projects, including research projects or proof of concepts, usually provide that “aha!” moment. It’s that point when you solve that puzzle that you have banged your head on the wall for days. Suddenly everything seems obvious, that tedious problem that’s given you some anxiety instantly melts. You feel dumb that you didn’t see the path to get here sooner, but you also feel emboldened by the fact that YOU solved that problem.
Those moments are typically the kinds of things I’ll list on my resume. Such as when I realized that some slight adjustments to our Data Warehouse brought our load times from 16 hours to 4 hours or when we reduced 10,000 daily deadlocks down to 0.
I’m not sure how most people get those moments, but I tend to have them when I’m doing something completely different. I’ll do all of my research and testing, but usually the solution doesn’t come immediately during those periods of time.
You have questions you can google:
How do I SUM and GROUP BY?
Then you have questions you can’t google:
What would be the impact of doing a SUM and GROUP BY on my production system?
It’s those questions where you need to apply research and practice to create your own dots to connect. Sort of like putting together a map and at the end of the map you’ll find the treasure.
It’s when I’m running, going to bed, showering, or biking to work where out of seemingly nowhere… an idea strikes! You’ll have times where you are too close to the problem to see around it and find the solution. Sometimes you just need to take a step back and think about things, sometimes those things will piece themselves together for you.
I’m also the kind of person who obsesses over problems. If I can’t figure something out at work, it’s going to linger in the back of my mind until I know the answer. Or if I have an interview or a colleague asks me a question I don’t know the answer to, I can’t rest until I know that answer.
Other signs of a good day is when you are working with people who know more than you do. When I worked at Solarwinds, there was no end of tenured DBA’s who were knowledgeable. Every time we chatted about things, I felt like I learned 20 different topics. My time there was definitely an exponential burst of learning, but this goes back into what I mentioned earlier. You should have some passion for technology, because it’s that curiosity to learn and grow that is going to help you build your career.
To end on the “best day ever” piece, here were a few great and memorable (but not typical) moments I’ve experienced in IT:
- When we created a Christmas tree out of Windows Server 2000 cd’s.
- Flying to San Jose, CA to give a presentation and work the booth at SQL Saturday.
- Driving with the team down to a SQL Server 2012 announcement and features party.