A Wandering Mind

Several months back at SQL Saturday 121 in Philadelphia, I had a great conversation in the speaker’s room with Mike Hillwig (blog | twitter) about career paths. One point that he made which really stuck with me was (and I’m paraphrasing roughly here) that the best way to find the job you truly love is simply to figure out what it is you like about your current one, then find a job where that’s all you do. I remember he attributed the advice to someone else, but for the life of me I can’t remember who (Mike please feel free to jump in and jog my woeful memory if you read this); in any case, the words really resonated with me.

For the last three years and change I’ve been in some form of a DBA / support role. And while overall I really enjoy my job, there’s a lot of aspects of it that I don’t find terribly fun. For instance:

• Doing routine administrative work, such as creating logins or databases on servers, fixing broken backups, etc.
• Having an endless barrage of “this server is broke, please fix it” e-mails, when in nine out of ten cases, the problem is their code, not my server.
• Troubleshooting hard to trace infrastructure issues. Don’t even get me started on my frustration with Kerberos and Network Load Balancing.

But, let’s face it; those tasks are part of a DBA’s role.

After Mike’s words had rattled around in my brain for a few weeks, I began thinking: “Self! What are the things that you really enjoy about your job (outside of the people on your team, who are great)?” So I pulled out my thinking notepad, and started scribbling. The top three that I came up with, in no particular order, are:

• Solving problems – not to be confused with “troubleshooting”; perhaps a more apt description would be “determining solutions for business and technical problems”.
• Designing data structures – I’m by no means a data modeler, but I do enjoy the process of normalizing data, and creating elegant, simple structures to store information.
• Performance Tuning – In an ideal world this skill wouldn’t be necessary, since all code would be written properly from the start and scale well. Fortunately for me, that’s not the case. There’s just something incredibly satisfying about taking some god-awful Gordian knot of nested subqueries and views, untangling it, and seeing an application’s performance just soar through the roof.

After this exercise I began thinking about what kind of job would let me focus on these things. After some thought, I came to a startling conclusion: I had to join the dark side. I had to become a developer.

But not just any developer, mind you. I could never be one of those heads down, coding machines that are just handed specs and go off on their merry way. No, I needed to find a job where I would have a fair bit of interaction with people, while still writing the code and getting my hands dirty.

Then, almost as if by magic, an amazing offer came my way. I was given a chance to join an elite group of database architects / developers within my company. This team is essentially the SQL Server equivalent of the A-Team; If you have a problem with SQL Server, and no one else can help, you bring these guys in. They do not own any specific applications or databases themselves. Rather, they come in, do a targeted assessment of the situation, then perform surgical work to get things back on track. Need help determining how best to store your database in source control (because you are doing that, right?)? They’ll deliver tools to help script out and organize your code, plus make deploying new releases a painless process. Have a query that is running horribly and can’t figure out why? They’ll rip apart the code and rewire it behind the scenes, and show you how to do it yourself going forward. In many ways, they are a lot like an internal consulting group.

At the time the offer came down the team only had two members, but combined they have almost twice my lifetime in experience working with databases. With their workload getting larger and larger by the day, it became apparent some additional help was needed. And I’m truly honored to say I’ve been given the chance to join them.

It’s bittersweet, for sure. I have loved my time in production support, and will miss the people and fun times I’ve had there. But I’m also incredibly excited about this new opportunity and the challenges it will bring.

And to Mike (and whomever originally passed the advice down to him): thanks for the push.

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