Bad career advice from a 14 year old

I was having a conversation with my 14-year-old grandson Thomas the other day. He was telling me that is signed up to take a programming class in school next term and sees a future career in technology. He loves playing video games, so maybe developing them would be a good choice. He also was thinking about being an “IT guy” because of certain things an IT guy can do.

I was curious about what he thought working in IT involved since most of his knowledge was probably from movies. The first scenario he came up with involved getting fired so that the company could hire someone else for less money to do the same job. It wouldn’t be long before they begged the IT guy to come back – at 20 times the old salary – since no one else could do the job.

As exciting as this fantasy sounded to young Thomas, keeping knowledge to oneself to improve job security is a bad idea. Too much job security due to hoarding knowledge means that you cannot easily take time off and never fully disconnect from the job. Documentation, automation, run books, and cross-training should be the norm.

The second fantasy scenario involved the sabotaging the company so that data and systems would be lost if IT guy was ever let go. Thomas imagined that said company was actually corrupt and doing lots of evil things. Once an investigation uncovered the misdeeds, IT guy would be a hero for taking down the company.

As exciting as that scenario sounded to young Thomas, schemes like this are criminal regardless of the wholesomeness of the targeted organization. In my opinion, anyone with intentions of hurting a company through these means doesn’t deserve the job, and IT professionals should use their powers for good and not evil

Of course, organizations should have controls in place, such as separation of duties, auditing, encryption, and well-defined policies and procedures to prevent internal attacks.

I would love for Thomas to become interested in a technology career, and I’m sure his expectations will change by then.

Kathi Kellenberger

Join the debate, and respond to the editorial on the forums

Phil Factor describes the problem of preserving data that is left 'in limbo' when you need to revert the database to a previous version that has no way of accommodating it.

Israel Valverde explains the triple benefits of extending SQL Monitor to cover your SQL Server instances running on Amazon RDS, in terms of SQL Server performance optimization, controlling AWS-hosting costs, and in having a single, unified view of the health of all your SQL Servers, regardless of where they are hosted.

Have you taken the 2021 State of Database DevOps survey yet? If you or your organization uses databases, we want to hear from you! Complete the survey for advance access to the final research report, and to be entered into a prize draw for a $500 Amazon voucher. Plus, for each submission we receive, we’ll donate $1 to the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund.

Today’s post is a guest article from a friend of Dallas DBAs, writer, and fantastic DBA Jules Behrens (B|L) One common performance issue that is not well known that...

After my last post I wanted to test deploying to Azure SQL Database using GitHub Actions. To check that it all runs smoothly...

Without a good backup and recovery strategy in place, a DBA should make sure their resume is always up to date. In this article, Greg Larsen discusses what should...

After architecting and migrating some of the world...

Join Microsoft MVP Grant Fritchey and Redgate's Owen Standage on a journey through the hidden treasures of SQL Prompt. Discover features of the unknown that will enable you to write, format, analyze and refactor your SQL effortlessly.

Details: Database DevOps solutions can help your organization protect business-critical data and improve the efficiency and quality of your software delivery. Register for this Microsoft hosted webinar to learn how you can rapidly implement a database DevOps solution with Azure and Redgate tools.

With 2020 coming to a close, it's time to look at the new year ahead. Join our final 2020 summit this December 10th, to discover how to implement a generative culture for successful IT teams and how database DevOps will drive growth and ROI in a remote world. Register to tune in live or watch the recordings.

It’s no surprise that nonprofit organizations providing health-related services are overconsumed during the COVID-19 pandemic, but what about other types of nonprofits?...

The model-free, data-driven technique discussed here is so basic that it can easily be implemented in Excel, and we actually provide an Excel implementation.

Alright clever IoT folks, I've got two of these garage door openers, what do you reckon the best way of connecting them with Apple HomeKit is?...

Click to learn more about author Thomas Frisendal. What can data modelers learn from accountants? Accounting is a solidly established practice that the world cannot live without. One of...

To prevent data change anomalies, a database should be normalized. Did you know that there are 10 normal forms? In this article, Joe Celko reviews normalizing databases including commonly used normal forms.

There were so many questions asked at a recent presentation that I just didn’t have time to answer them all. However, many of them were really interesting, so I...

Building out processes and mechanisms for automate...

I’m happy to announce the latest version of our SSIS Framework includes global parameters! I can hear some of you thinking, … “What Are Global Parameters, Andy?” I’m so...

Total: 1 Average: 5This article aims to help beginners understand the basics of the T-SQL COALESCE function and its application for handling NULL values. Additionally, the readers will get...

SQL Developer is a popular free tool for working with Oracle databases. In this article Srinivasan Suresh explains several features of SQL Developer that can make you more productive.

Welcome to part twelve of the plansplaining series, where I’ll discuss foreign keys in the context of execution plans.

Databases really do make you pay dearly for mistakes, and new linguistic functionality is not implemented with performance in mind...

My annual Black Friday Sale is on now! Save thousands on the best training classes in the industry.

In the steps below I will show you how to change this setting to allow for larger dataset sizes...

Have you noticed the updates Power BI dataflows ha...

This article shows techniques to obtain a ranking based on more than one column. The ranking can be both static and dynamic...

Last week I was honoured to take part in the latest edition of the Power BI Dev Camp which is run by my colleague Ted Patterson...

This week a customer came to me with the following problem: they had scheduled the refresh of their dataset but their source data wasn’t always ready in time, so...

Introduction Median is a useful statistical function, which first time appeared in SSAS 2016 and in Power BI around that year as well. There are several articles on how...

This book aims to give you the skills to set up, administer, and maintain SQL Server 2019 databases - how does it fare?

In the article, An overview of SQL Machine Learning with R scripts, we learned the R services integration with SQL Server 2019. We also explored a few useful external packages.

Microsoft announced cross-platform support of SQL Server – the SQL Server 2017 and SQL Server 2019 work on Microsoft Windows and Linux...

Being in the cloud does have many benefits, from lower administration to fast scaling but another “side effect” of operating in Azure SQL Database is the cloud first nature... The...

There are certain T-SQL statements whose syntax I ...

Total: 2 Average: 5 Introduction A view in SQL Server is a virtual table-like structure based on the result-set of an SQL statement. On the surface, a view is...

Total: 2 Average: 5 Outer join is at the center stage today. And this is part 2 of your ultimate guide to SQL joins. If you missed part 1,...