T-SQL tuesday 163: Best career advice?

This months invitation for T-SQL tuesday came from Gethyn Ellis (B | L | T) . Here original request is explained here.

Gethyn made a flying start with this request. He was one week late. But, Steve Jones (@wayoutwest and Steve Jones | LinkedIn) has given him the opportunity to continue the Journey. The full request of what Gethyn wants to know from us is: What is the best piece of Career Advice you have ever received as a data professional?

What career advice did I get?

As some of you know, I have been working in the industry for years, so I have had many pieces and types of advice.

One of my first jobs was something in a shop. I was doing sales, repairs and deliveries. The owner ones told me that listening and analyzing was something which was one of my strength, but that i jumped into conclusions to fast. I improved on that and it helps me in all the things I do.

During school we were required to do a scholarship. I was send to an hospital to help the IT team, while I was doing education on accountancy and administration. At that time there was no IT possibility on the educational level I was doing. The guys there liked the work I was doing and I was taking on much more work than I could possible handle in 8 weeks. During that period there was a PC plan for employees. We as the IT guys sold the machines and a company should deliver them. It was thought that we should deliver about 30 PC’s but it ended up in 96. The method for installing software as suggested by the company delivering the PC’s was becoming a Diskjockey. At that time there was PC-Anywhere. I suggested to do it with a parallel cable. That went a lot smoother. They were happy that I had that stuff. We made it to deliver all the PC’s in time. My takeaway: sometimes one should hold off talking to people to sell if you are not sure you all can deliver.

Another job was at an internal helpdesk. I needed to help out all of the people with complaints and required internal moves to other desks. If you have are like me, and you have done that a few weeks, one gets bored. So I made sure the moves went smooth, and I was doing daily controls in a few days. It was the first time that I worked with VaxVMS and Windows NT 3.51. I got control over how it worked and in notime again I did more than required. It ended up that the work dried up.. I needed to leave before the planned end date. Never work harder than your job angel can fly 🙂

In the late nineties I worked for a big chemical company at the Head Office. A job as an internal Webmaster was offered. Within half a year I was installing IIS servers for the Internet purpose and also for the Intranet. Together with a colleague we build an automated install, using VBScript. After this a question came in to develop a dynamic website while reading some data from a textfiles or ms access databases. Hey, because ASP looks similar to VBScript in the way how you code it, does not make me an ASP specialist.

For the same company I was allowed to go to TechEd 2003 Barcelona edition together with a colleague (who unfortunately past away a few years after that). We found there a product called Tahoe Server and Content Management Server. We knew that we had a question to make documents available based on tags. We thought… hmm. Tagging documents, query the store based on tags, with great looking dynamic pages.. can’t we combine them? Back home I did some investigations and tried to do something like this in CMS and SPS (codename Tahoe became Sharepoint Portal Server). It worked. We showed it to the interested persons, they added a lot of requirements but we needed to deliver. It took two full years with a team of 8 to develop. My takeaway.. if someone else sells your stuff, do not accept it without any remarks…

One of my previous jobs I was working in a team as a SQL dba. We needed to make sure that Biztalk could deliver its messages within a timeframe. Biztalk is heavily depending on SQL and it must be 24*7, so we needed to build a HA cluster for that. We delivered, updated and worked with the cluster for years, we consolidated a lot of different databases to a few and because management wanted it, we should make our work obsolete by outsourcing. As a team we worked on it it. One of my co workers recommended me to start investing in myself and make sure I got a network of people behind me. I did a lot of trainings, improved skills and agreed with Managament that I could go away as soon as the stuff was handed over. So during the last months of my life at that company I decided to go self employed. Because my network was growing, getting to know me, I found a job quite fast. My take away of that one is that my experiences and knowledge is usable and wanted in a lot of companies.

During my current job, not self employed anymore, I am lead engineer, security specialist in the team, and infrastructural specialist for the SQL team. It is great working there. I have been to Pass twice and have joined a lot of user group meetings, and other Data Days. So much fun to find out that every company has the same road to following. Some of the are in front of you but a lot of them are ahead of where we as a company are. Speaking to fellow visitors on these events made me think that they can learn from me. And I can learn from them. After speaking to some friends like Kevin Chant and Gethyn Ellis (who?) they convinced me to take the step from being a visitor to become a speaker. A lot of tries are needed and there are not enough events for everyone. Happy enough that our company organizes an Engineering Week twice a year where i can speak, but I am also happy that I am allowed to speak at at least 3 different events this year. Two virtuals and one in person:

  • DataYork ( June 1st, thank you Marcin Gminski)
  • DataToboggan ( June 24, thank you Richard Munn)
  • DataDay Oslo (September 1st, thank you Johan Ludvig Brattås)

Another thing I learned is that you should also be prepared for (unknown) things that are going to happen. If you can fix things now, do it. Look at where you want to be in five years. Take opportunities into consideration if they help you to get there Also, make sure you and your family are number one on the list of priorities else you end up in lonely.

Conclusion

Without all of the advice mentioned above I can say that I would not be where I am now. I must be grateful to any person mentioned without names and with names. They were all kind enough to give me learning points.