November 18, 2016 at 1:19 pm
please delete
November 20, 2016 at 8:18 am
My experience is probably not typical. Having worked at the same place with only a couple of IT workers, whenever we hired, which was very rare, it was always a junior developer. They refused to hire any senior person. Indeed when I was laid off a couple years ago they didn't replace me.
Now I'm working at a much larger IT group. But budget is so tight that it screams in pain. They don't hire anybody, regardless of what level they're at. So I'm the "new guy". And I've been given mostly the mundane jobs to help maintain. And yes it is very boring. And truthfully what I hate the most about it is that I really cannot effect any change at all. We don't have the source code to fix anything, so all we can do is fix data wrongfully entered. Its extremely boring to just get into SSMS. write a SQL script or use one of the 100's written by other people to fix the problem, make the change and then wait for the next probably to come up. Maybe next week.
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
November 21, 2016 at 7:43 am
No matter what people say, for most people having a job they enjoy is the most important thing
With that I totally agree.
November 21, 2016 at 10:03 am
Review those 'boring routine tasks' to see if they help bring a new hire up to speed on the company's systems. And then ask them where they would improve them. You get a double bonus out of that - on the job training and a fresh set of eyes for pain points.
Hopefully that new hire will have ideas for improvement and then they can be the ones who implement them. That gets them into the interesting work situation under controlled conditions.
I agree that new hire doesn't always equate to beginner but they do need to understand the systems, the company, and why things are sometimes done the way they're done. The best way is to actually do it.
After they've gotten their feet under them and some proof out there that they're capable then they get into the split of tasks.
November 22, 2016 at 9:32 am
JustMarie (11/21/2016)
<snip />After they've gotten their feet under them and some proof out there that they're capable then they get into the split of tasks.
Speaking as one who is the new guy, even getting your feet under you doesn't necessarily mean you can demonstrate your capability. That could just be because you're never allowed to make any difference. For example, when I first came on board I was put onto a team to support a third party product, both the SQL Server database and the front-end ASP.NET code. Only we're under very strict orders to never, under any circumstances whatsoever, allowed to change the ASP.NET code!!!!
And unfortunately this also extends to the database. I know this is going to not endear me to all of the DBA's on SSC, but I'm afraid the truth sometimes hurts. Here goes. This third party product, both the database and the front-end ASP.NET code were written by a DBA. She is brilliant, when it comes to the SQL she wrote for stored procedures and SSIS packages. However she lacks a lot when it comes to designing a front-end application. For some reason when she wrote the front-end code she wrote it so that whenever data was entered it was always fixed in cement. That works fine if all of your data is entered by robots, but we employee humans, who are prone to make mistakes. And here's where it gets weirder. So whenever the inevitable happened where users made mistakes entering data, we had to open up SSMS, open up a table and modify the data directly. Or at least that was what we did in the simple situations in which only one or two tables were involved. When more than 2 tables were involved there arose several SQL scripts to handle those situations. And of course everybody has their own versions of those SQL scripts. God only knows how many different versions of SQL scripts there were to get one modification done. After some months of doing the most mundane things of opening tables and making fixes to data, I get sick of it and wrote a stored procedure to handle the most frequent task we had to do that involved more than 2 tables. I submitted that stored proc to the change request board over 15 months ago. It was never heard of again and to this day no action was ever taken.
That's a long story, I'm sorry. I bring it up to say that forces may be in play that will never allow anyone to prove themselves.
I'll finish by saying that since I came onboard and struggled with something I don't believe anyone should have to struggle with, the vendor came up with a new version of the database and front-end. In a huge surprise the front-end now allows the user to do a little bit of modification of some of the data they've entered in error, so its improved some. And I'm being pulled for others to take over. (I don't think they're newer employees than me, just that they're getting stuck with it.)
Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.
November 22, 2016 at 1:21 pm
Interesting editorial, I agree with it although I've never been in a situation where newcomers were just landed with the boring stuff so that's not something I've had to struggle against.
It is important however that everyone in a dba or developer role (and that includes all junior and middle and senior managers responsible for technical functions) has experience of customer support/production support and is willing to undertake support tasks and to communicate with users, so newcomers have to be willing to spend part of their time on support and that has sometimes been a problem (when someone made a mistake and hired some prima donna who reckoned support was beneath him).
I've come across situations where some new people say, after a week or two, that they want less responsability and less authority, they don't feel they are capable of doing all of their job, which maybe suggests that the treatment of those newcomers was too much the other way from dumping the boring stuff on them, so I think it there's a bit of a juggling act needed to get the right balance.
Tom
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