I’ve been working as a Senior DBA (3rd Level Support) for many years.
I really enjoy my role, but sometimes you need to be careful with “ideas’ thieves”.
Let me explain in details…
“Why Senior DBAs vs. Snipers?”
Well, in my Playstation, I really enjoy to play as Sniper…yeah…very cool..lol
Firstly, let me list some points in common between both jobs: Senior DBAs vs. Military Snipers.
1) There are only few of them in your Company as in Army;
2) Both of them need to have specific and deep skills;
3) Both of them stay more time being prepared (training) than working in the field;
4) When they are called, everybody expect a fast and accurate solution;
5) The credibility is one of the most important point in their careers;
6) When both of them say: “I have a solution”, they are not guessing.
So, I could list more points, but only these are enough to ilustrate this post.
What about “ideas’ thieves”?
Well, this can be a problem, specially when you work for a big company and there are more then one team working on a critical situation.
In the last few weeks, I had some ideas stolen.
How?
I was engaged to work on critical situation as usual.
After my preliminar analisys I detected a Windows Server configuration that needed to be changed.
For my surprise the Configuration change was not allowed by Windows team.
Their argument was: “We need to check another points and we’ll get in touch as needed”
My next step was just to say: “Ok, if is not critical anymore, I’m stepping back”.
Guess what?
Few days later the Windows configuration that I recommended was changed (without notice), and fixed the issue.
Why this kind of situation is important?
Pretty simple, when we got a perfect shot, this shot become “real experience” and not only “theory”.
In the next time if I face a similar case, I’ll have more confidence and evidences that my recommendation will work and the customer will be happy faster.
So, that’s it, leave your comments and let’s discuss.
Well… I’m just a Private… someday… I’ll try to be a sniper, well I mean… A Senior…
keep working and you can get there
Very nice comparison! Never thought of our work in these terms, but yes, it makes sense!
Alex – to avoid this from happening you should create a report. I’ve experienced the same thing but in my case the actual change should be done in conjunction with other steps. The report will be sent to all stakeholders (I guess you have a performance problem of some kind). This is quite important because different teams can also have other issues that are related to the same change that might worsen or disappear.
The example in my case was memory tuning in a multi instance sql cluster. One of the snipers removed the max memory setting and caused excessive paging to occur leaving all instances slowing down considerably. I didn’t do anything about it – just got the fact’s on the table that one teammember had changed value since I assessed the system in the first place. And that this person didn’t understand memory configurations of sql server.
Weltmeister,
Yes, a report is useful.
We have an Incident Tool where everything can be recorded in, and all teams have access on this tool to research.
awsome post Alex, I could remember that situation , your solution came faster than any other team could provide, that was less than an hour and half.
Congratulations by the way!
Reblogged this on Junior Galvão – MVP – SQL Server.
I only work in a crew of people I’ve worked with before and trust. Part of contracting with us involves establishing that confidence / trust working relationship. No prima donnas I don’t care how good they are, if they can’t work as a team and garner the trust of the rest of the group, they’re worthless. If we need tools – hardware and/or software, we get them. This is time and materials and we know what we’re doing. We’ll establish a requirements on both the part of the employer and the contractor. It will be clear what you need and what we need. We work, eat and sleep until the job is done. We may build hardware and software tools we need – if it’s not clearly part of the deliverable, if anything is not clearly part of the deliverable, it will will belong to us. This will be a trivial matter to work out. Everybody signs a non-disclosure.