Category Archives: Random Thoughts

A Slice of Humble Pie

Posted by on 2010/08/13 3 comments

Message to Seniors:

Math was always easy for me.  I took calculus in high school and enjoyed it very much.  However, during my post-graduate degree, I took an accounting class, which was very difficult for me to grasp.  The whole double-entry idea was foreign to me and I got frustrated.  Here is an example conversation from that course:

Me: “[Classmate Name], I don’t understand, can you help me with problem #2?”

[Classmate Name]: “Oh that problem was easy” or “You should be able to get that” or even “I can’t believe you didn’t get that one”

Again, we go back to good ol’ Nick Burns either talking down to colleagues for the purposes of making ourselves sound or feel better or having unrealistic expectations.

In reference to talking ourselves up, the answer to that is humbleness.  Be humble.  Even if you are the expert and know every potential option of a feature because you wrote it, be humble.  Arrogance is an immediate turn off and a path to working alone.  Not to mention there is always someone who knows more than you do (and they are probably younger). If you are having problems with that see Be Excellent to Each Other.

As far as unrealistic expectations go—there is nothing wrong with having high expectations, however I am not going to yell at my 4-year-old daughter for not being able to write this blog post for me.  It would be great if she was able to and I would dote on her.  That would increase her confidence and excitement to write again.  However, if she does not write it, then I am not going to tear her down for not being able to do something that is really outside of her current ability.  Of course that does not mean she will not get there one day, but I have to allow her time to grow and learn.

Message to Juniors:

Let’s be honest, one of the best things about the SQL Community is everyone’s willingness to help.  I do not see any other community with a specific twitter help hashtag, let alone training on cruises.  However, the other side of that is someone can fake a lot by getting all their answers from the community.  They can even be seen through social networking as knowing more than they really do. However if you sit down and talk with them, you will quickly start seeing how much they know or do not know.

This can be due to the “fake it till you make it” mentality or just pride.  Let me be clear here, there is nothing wrong with ambition or confidence.  However when it turns into pride, you are in trouble.   Pride means you have stopped learning because you know it all now.

If someone is helping or teaching and the response is often or always:

  • I did it that way this time, but I usually do it [insert best practice here].
  • I always just write it that way to start and clean it up later
  • Yeah I know that
  • I used to do that all the time, just haven’t done it in a while
  • I was trained on that but didn’t use it right away, so I lost it
  • I always create my own scripts from scratch
  • Yeah that is what I meant

If you catch yourself saying things like that often, then expect to lose your help soon.  They are willing to help and share their knowledge—soak it up, do not reject it.  The old adage is true, the more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know.  It is ok to say, “I don’t know”.  That is what leads to learning and even mentorship. 

Am I a senior or a junior?

The answer is unequivocally, both.  So if you only read one section, go read the other :) .  No one knows everything about everything.  So maybe you are a senior in SSIS, but a junior in SSRS.  Maybe you are an absolute expert in tuning queries but your IO turned to molasses and you are a junior on SANs.  In our industry we are always learning as there is a huge amount of depth and even larger amount of breadth, and, oh yeah, things are changing constantly.

Be honest if you don’t know something; give yourself and others the time they need to learn.  Pride goes before the fall and humbleness is a virtue.

Proverbs 16:18

Be Excellent to Each Other

Posted by on 2010/08/06 4 comments

Imagine this scenario:

It is a beautiful, sunny day with a cool breeze.  You are walking down the street feeling on top of the world.  Suddenly the person walking in front of you catches their foot and falls, scuffing their knee really bad.  Which would you do?

  • Help them get back on their feet, seeing to their pain and soothing their embarrassment by informing them you’ve fallen before, then tell them to keep on walking
  • Inform them that they fell down, which also affected your progress, so they should get back up and get moving immediately.  Also, point out if they had just been more careful none of this would have happened.

I will give you a moment to decide.  Ok, time is up.

I think everyone would like to think they would do the first option. In fact, if you were the one that fell I know everyone would want the first option to happen. 

Now let me change the situation. You are the senior team member tasked with a deadline that cannot slip.  You just did a code review and one of the others did a bad job.  They know better but it looks like they got a bit careless due to the deadline and forgot that they are professional.  Now which would you do:

  • Help them put quality back into focus and show them how they can get back to producing better code.  Tell them we will get it done in time and even say you have made that mistake before of sacrificing quality for quantity.
  • Inform them that their code is bad, which is now putting us further behind and they need to work extra to fix it as soon as possible.  Also, point out that they are never to do this again and if they had only followed the coding standards this would not have been an issue.

Again, I will give you a moment to decide.  Ok, time is up.

This one may seem to be shaded of gray (or grey if you are reading this across the pond); however, I submit to you that it is no different from yelling at the person that fell in the first situation.

I cannot remember one time in my life where I performed subpar that I was not aware of it, often acutely aware of it.  Whether it was due to lack of resources, training, motivation or just plain lazy, if I did a bad job, I knew it.  The last thing I needed was for someone to point out the fact that I did a bad job.  I needed someone to encourage me, not discourage me.  Does someone telling you to work harder, actually accomplish anything?  If it does, then why were you not giving it your all in the first place? 

It seems to be more and more frequent that people are either just interested in the short term activities or dismiss others via “they stink”.

What have you done for me lately?

This whole idea when dealing with people just does not cut it.  I am all for holding people accountable and having consistent results, but we should really base our decisions on their best day, not their worst.  Ok, they really screwed up; you think they are not aware of that?  Of course there might be consequences, but does that also need to include discouraging them?  Even if the consequences are that they need to be let go, do you really need to make them feel worse?  Talk to the problems, tell them how to fix it or how to grow and encourage them, even if you have to send them out the door.

They Stink

I can always tell when my wife talked with the IT Admin at her work; she has Nick Burns for an admin.  Even though that is a spoof, it often is not far from the truth. Sure, we might not be that blatant or we excuse it by calling it a “rant”.  However, as most of our mothers said, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all”.  As I pointed out earlier, the way you address something matters.

Take your time do it right

We are often encouraging people to take their time and do things right the first time.  So why does this idea not apply to developing people?  If we take our time and have some patience and grace with people that have different skill sets, maybe we can actually create a better workplace for everyone.  If life really does come down to a few moments or a few decisions, then how important and how much affect can you have on someone else’s life by what you say and do?  If done right, you could help shape the next superstar, if done wrong you could cause a downward spiral that ends with a thud.

I have a great amount of respect of business owners that have employees and realize that what they do affects not only employees but their families as well.  My current manager told us the beginning of last year that his number one goal was to ensure everyone working then, would be still working the end of the year.  Not make sure he gets a great bonus, or the company makes a lot of money.  I have to respect those type of things, because people matter, in fact it is often our only true competitive advantage.

Excellence

To quote Talent is Never Enough by John C. Maxwell:

Success bases our worth on comparison with others.  Excellence gauges our value by measuring us against our personal potential.

So stop competing with co-workers or putting them down, and actually work with them.  In other words, be excellent to one another.

1 Thessalonians 5:11

Talk to me Goose

Posted by on 2010/07/30 1 comment

SQLSaturday brought to you by foursquare

A few months ago, I had the pleasure and honor to help organize the first SQLSaturday in Chicagoland with Wendy (blog | twittter)  and Ted (blog | twitter).  Let me first say that I thoroughly enjoyed it.  Obviously there are things we could of done better and some things we just simply weren’t aware of, but it was without a doubt the best SQLSaturday I have ever been to (full disclosure: it is the only SQLSaturday I have ever been to :) ).

However one of things I thought was interesting about it was that it never would have happened if not for foursquare and twitter.

I cannot get to the posts now, but sometime last October I had posted via foursquare last I was at Magenic in Lombard, IL when Wendy saw that it was only a mile away from her work in Lombard.  Within a week, we met for lunch.  That is the luncheon where Wendy and I first shook hands and said let’s do a SQLSaturday.  Thank you twitter and foursquare.

How many methods can we use?

Just the other day I was chatting on IM with Ted.  He asked me for something, however we were off IM by the time I got it, so I called and left him a voicemail.  Evidently, he was at dinner so he texted me back and then I Twitter DM’d him to which he called and left a voice mail for me.  What is cool about that is each of us communicated with whatever was easiest at the time and the conversation context was not lost.

More <> Better

Of course more communication methods do not in any way, mean more efficient or even better communication.  In fact, it is probably the opposite.  Conversations held 140 characters at a time do not have much depth.  Plus we all have been in the situation of being 10 characters over and trying to figure out what characters we can remove yet still get the meaning across.

This has the similar effect of the newspaper headline.  It is catchy and sells but the depth is not the best.  In addition, studies shows that the majority of communication is non-verbal, or in the context of this blog post: non-text.  Not everything can be boiled down to the 140-character sound bite.

Lonely and complicated

It is unbelievable that we live with 6 billion other people on the planet but one of the largest problems is loneliness.  I mean it is documented about our society regarding loneliness and interaction:

When Americans say “Hi, how are you?”, they are only expecting a “Fine,” or a “Fine, thank you” or a “Good” in response.  It is not usually an invitation to a lengthy conversation.

And truth be known, I’m as guilty as the next person of doing that,

There are some things that are inherently complex and therefore need a deeper level of discussion.  Having a real relationship is one of them.  And you know what?  That is ok.