Learning to Grind

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Learning to Grind

Steve Jones - SSC Editor

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Points: 736478
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December 16, 2024 at 12:00 am

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Comments posted to this topic are about the item Learning to Grind

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David.Poole SSC Guru Points: 76035 More actions · Answer 1

It takes a lot of hard work to make something look easy.

In all honesty my experience has been that the ones that don't grind are the exceptions rather than the rule. They stand out for the wrong reasons and this causes problems

Their negative exceptionalism give a false impression that their attitude is prevalent. It really isn't
They can cause resentment for those who are prepared to put in the time
They can demotivate the team

When someone is lazy in one area of their life they will be lazy in others too.

I am mindful to make sure that over-reliance on a manager does not have lack of self-confidence at its root. There is an element of psychological safety that must be there for people to be comfortable with trying/failing.

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Steve Jones - SSC Editor SSC Guru Points: 736478 More actions · Answer 2

I think you likely have a good team. I think most of Redgate grinds. However, in many other places I've worked, relatively few people grind away at their careers.

Rod at work SSC-Dedicated Points: 34017 More actions · Answer 3

Steve, your op ed this morning reminds me of when I was in college working on my BS in Mathematics. I worked my way through school, tutoring Mathematics. The basic stuff; simple graphs, etc. The courses I tutored were required for graduation. I identified three categories of people who took the remedial math courses I tutored.

The first category, my favorite, were those who loved math to those which math came fairly easily to. These people were easy to tutor; just handled a few of the tougher topics, but basically it was easy for them.

The second group, which was the largest, were those who really didn't like Mathematics and struggled. But they put in the time and effort and passed, so they could go on to graduate in whatever their major was in.

The third and smallest group were those who resented having to take Mathematics. The top level of this group I could encourage by reminding them that they needed that course in order to graduate. So, as much as they hated Mathematics, the put up with it to get a passing grade, and then move on. But the ones at the bottom of this group no amount of reasoning with them worked. They hated Mathematics so much that they couldn't care less if they didn't pass the course.

In the last decade I've seen a change. That third, smaller group seems to have grown significantly. It now appears to me that third group is the majority. Even though their managers aren't training them, they don't want to learn anything new. They are decent people, the types who would give you the shirt off their backs, but they won't spend any time learning anything new. I'm at a loss to explain why this third group has grown in number and percentage.

Kindest Regards, Rod Connect with me on LinkedIn.

David.Poole SSC Guru Points: 76035 More actions · Answer 4

Rod at work wrote:

In the last decade I've seen a change. That third, smaller group seems to have grown significantly. It now appears to me that third group is the majority. Even though their managers aren't training them, they don't want to learn anything new. They are decent people, the types who would give you the shirt off their backs, but they won't spend any time learning anything new. I'm at a loss to explain why this third group has grown in number and percentage.

The "we've got calculators and AI will do everything for us brigade".

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Jeff Moden SSC Guru Points: 1004406 More actions · Answer 5

I think people have been going a bit nuts for the last 15 or so years and especially in the last 6 or so years. I just found out about a project at one of the companies that I help out with. They're writing Python to extract AD information from our on-prem main Windows box, GZiping the file, sending it to S3 (which I agree with for archival purposes) then, on AWS, unzipping the file, reading the file, and remotely updating one of our on-prem production databases for any differences AND storing the change history in Temporal Tables just to make sure we have duplicate data stored as many times as possible.

Basically, they've rewritten BULK_INSERT in Python without all the error checking or performance that BULK_INSERT provides.

If it weren't causing the company to spend money that it doesn't have to, I could laugh it off as people thinking there's some business value in the creation of Dorodangos while playing with their navel entirely too much.

This kind of Dorodango...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiJ9fy1qSFI

--Jeff Moden

RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.

Helpful Links:
How to post code problems
How to Post Performance Problems
Create a Tally Function (fnTally)