Sometimes the difference between being a boss and a regular DBA shines through in the worst way.
I’m interviewing a few guys right now for a position I have open on my team and I’ll say I’m getting all walks of life.
I’m getting everything from guys with lots of experience to those just wanting to get started. This post is really about th guys with lots of experience though. More often than not what I see in guys with lots of experience is that they’ve never bothered really learning DBs very well. I spend most of the time I’m talking to them trying to figure out questions that are low enough for them to be able to answer. One guy in particular comes to mind. I don’t know if he reads my blog or not, but I guess we’ll find out huh?
This is really a unique position because I’ve interviewed him several times in the past few years. In fact, every time I have an opening he applies. The problem is that he’s always demonstrated on a perfunctory knowledge of SQL and this last time I was hoping for more, but he hasn’t improved at all that I can tell. In fact, he gave me all the opposite answers I needed. Always use @tables instead of #tables. Never use ‘select into’ because it’s a lazy way to code. You should use ‘insert into’ instead. Those were some specific answers he gave me this last go around. Unfortunately those are the same things he said last time too. So while he’s been working all this time, he doesn’t know any more than he did like 3-5yrs ago.
So this time I really felt compelled to write him and tell him how bad he was. I don’t do this kind of thing often, but since I’ve talked to him so many times and I’ve specifically seen how he hasn’t improved, I wanted to be honest with him in the hopes that it might spur him into doing something about it. So I sent a very honest email and of course these things always sound very harsh but what can I do?
So it’s times like this when being the one who’s in the position to tell people yes or no means sometimes you have to hurt someone’s feelings by telling them the truth.
How about you guys… have you ever had to tell someone the honest truth like that? How did it go?
In general I’m a big fan of the “give it to me straight, doc” approach. I’ve never been in a position to tell someone the honest truth about a job interview like that, but I know there’s been times where I wish my interviewer would have.
Sounding harsh or hurting feelings doesn’t really bother me – what would irk me more is not getting feedback which means I won’t know what I can do better the next time around. Feedback is the breakfast of champions, and you can improve upon any failure so long as you have some.
I think you did the right thing.
Yes, I had a co-worker that thought being a DBA was easy. He was a server admin. So he was not really privvy to a lot of what I did. His idea of being a DBA was doing backups and restores. Since he had never been a developer I kept him away from writing sp’s and SSIS packages. He could bearly write a query. (he never remembered Select COUNT(*) would return the number of rows in a table). We butted heads quite a bit. Then I was promoted to Enterprise DBA and they hired him to take my place. I was in a different building with a different boss and was mostly working on BI and ETL.
Once he became a “DBA” then the panic started setting in. I did help him as much as I could when I had time. A few months after he became the DBA he totally understood where I was coming from!
David
Sean,
An email sounds like a less than optimal approach. Would it have been possible to meet with him after work sometime? It sounds like you have a genuine interest in helping him advance, which is wonderful. I’m just hoping he doersn’t tune you out based upon how an email may come across.
I think it is always best to have a conversation for such things.
I too am finding it hard to find a technical dba. Everyone that seems to filter their way through HR.
I am searching for a DBA who can fault find, perf t-shoot, system build, benchmarking etc etc. All I seems to get are very basic “accidental” DBA’s. Yes, I too was one of those but I made it my mission to read books, subscribe to blogs etc etc and had made me what I am today.
I had to end a telephone interview promptly when I asked “what are DMVs”, they relpied “is it something to do with driving in the US?”. Also, “what are the different types of replication”, to which they responded “Clustering and Mirroring”.
I guess it’s difficult being the boss sometimes… But ask any boss if they’d like to trade places with someone else.
Unless someone reports directly to me, I have to be very careful about telling someone they suck (tactfully or otherwise). In the past I’ve come across lack of talent before, and it affected me directly. But I kept my mouth shut because being honest would not have spurred any improvements and also because it wasn’t my place to point it out.
You sent an honest email in the hopes that it spurs some action. I hope it does too. Good luck. 🙂
Unfortunately I feel the majority of emails are misinterpreted most of the time. Top that with telling someone you are not as good as you think you are -which I believe is what you said you did. If that is not a bone crusher or the guy did not have very bad feeling towards you for the next 72hrs, then there is no hope for him and he’s totally oblivious.
On the other hand, someone in your position (boss, experienced DBA, black belt, etc) should provide this kind of feedback when asked or you should ask for permission to give your opinion.
Hopefully the guy read this blog to realize you had good intentions when you wrote the email.