We have ourselves a conundrum: I’ll be in Denver on Friday night, and our potential guest host isn’t able to be there. Sure, we could try to Skype the show, but it’s a different dynamic (and I don’t trust hotel internet). We could set Sean up there by his lonesome, but then he’d cry, and that would make for terrible TV. We could substitute Freddie as the cohost, but then who would be the working Freddie? Nobody, that’s who.
BUT, we I don’t want to leave you, our people, without a show on Friday night. It wouldn’t be cricket!
The current plan is to pre-tape the show (hah, how archaic, “tape”), and then run it at the normal time: Friday, 11pm CST. Sean and Freddie and I will jump on chat and watch with you, so we’ll all be in on the fun together.
We here at MidnightDBA are nothing if not flexible. Unless, of course, we’re talking about the physical flexible, which involves bending joints and stretching ligaments.
Your mission: This week, mvelic and I (and several others) have been talking on the general theme of becoming a SQL speaker. My starter thought today is: We have an awful lot of people encouraging the SQL community to become speakers. Aren’t we going to have too many teachers soon? Comment with thoughts on this, or whatever else is on your mind. (Bonus points for mentioning tacos.)
-Jen of Avonlea
Thoughts of maybe some randomness:
I would say the problem is not having too many speakers but rather ensuring the quality of those that speak (although pretty much everyone has something good and valid to bring to the table).
One of the problems is going to be having an audience that would be receptive to what someone wanted to present. For example, I cannot see myself presenting at my local user group. It’s not that I don’t have anything to say, its that the audience would not be receptive (when you have a room full of the guys who write the product they aren’t going to want to hear about log shipping). Someone presenting last week during 24HOP mentioned knowing your audience (think it was Douglas McDowell) and this is key.
I’m going to be (hopefully) presenting down at a SQL Saturday in UT next month. I’ve seen that a great many folks who attend these events are people that frequently don’t attend user group meetings, are part-time DBAs or are still pretty new to the dev/DBA gig. These are the people that are going to be most receptive to any training (in particular anything that I’m going to bring to the table). It also means that presentations really need to be spot on as you don’t want people walking away with bad information.
So how about there be some kind of accreditation as regards speaking engagements (I know this is something that has been talked about in various places before and something that would be great if handled by PASS). Have PASS (example) say, “this person is accredited to talk about topics at x/y/z level”. It would give the potential presenter the comfort to know that their peers feel that they can speak at a given level and allow organizers of events to have the confidence in that person to bring them in.
One of the things that I have used as a reason for not giving any presentations in the past is the quality of folks that I see presenting now, but I came to realize that it comes down to sampling error. If I’m watching Brent Ozar, Kevin Kleine, Buck Woody, Tom LaRock, Jeremish Peschka or Sean McCown (sorry for putting your and Brent’s name in the same sentence) I’m going to plotz. There’s not a comparison and what, seriously, could I teach those guys. Sweet F.A. that’s what. That’s not what my target audience would be though, and those guys are not 99.9% of the SQL folks who would be looking to learn something. The only reason I decided to try and present was that I saw a tweet from TJay Belt who was having a lot of problems coming to grips with log shipping when working on his MCTS. I know log shipping, I’ve used it for years and I know more than enough to teach it to a bunch of folks and help them understand how it works, what it does and the benefits of it. That was a drop the taco on the plate and facepalm moment for me, just the idea that I can learn someone something and hadn’t been doing it up to this point because I was intimidated by people already near the top of their game.
Randomness completed.
I don’t think having too many teachers is a big problem. I see the issue in the light of survival of the fittest. That for each level of event – User Groups, PASS webinars, SQL Saturdays, SQL Rally, and the Summit – a speaker of a certain quality can fit into a niche. In order to move up that chain, that person has to continually up her game. Conversely, in order to stay at the top of one’s game, Summit quality speakers need to stay current as well. Granted, it’s probably a lot easy to stay current and on top than it is to break into that arena (well, for most of us anyway, Jen…), but I think the competitive nature of a speaker’s circuit allows for the “right quality of material for the proper level of event.”
Does this mean that Summit level folk are going to stop speaking at User Groups, webinars and SQL Saturdays? Hell no. Everyone seems to fill a niche in the community. I’ll gladly listen to Andy Leonard on anything SSIS because his chops are strong. The same goes for Denny Cherry or Brent Ozar when it comes to virtualization. And if I knew how to use it, I’d even listen to Sean on PowerShell…
I’m kidding, I do listen to Sean about PowerShell, I just wish I had a use for it at work! But to get back to the point, some of these niches are currently full of great folks that have risen to the top because they’ve identified an area of need and interest and filled it.
The other thought I had about “too many teachers” is that, and I’m not calling anyone old, people will eventually want to retire. Retire both from their day jobs and possibility from having such an active speaking schedule. When those people decide to take a backseat, or simply take it a little easy on themselves and their wallets, the community is going to need new folks to step up to the plate. Maybe that even means that experienced speakers are going to have to begin mentoring newer ones.
Anyway, those are my random thoughts. And I didn’t even reference tacos. Damn.
I think I’ll throw in the taco now. Mvelic swiped my idea before I even had a chance to write it – the important thing about ramping up new people (like me) as speakers is that eventually those who always speak at all the events are going to tire of it (due to insufficient taco snacks) and it’ll be up to the n00bs to step in and take their places. Now if none of us has had any experience speaking, then when it’s time to replace someone, there won’t be any speakers – and that would be bad because we’d have a room full of people eating tacos and no one to entertain them with new and fun information about SQL and tacos.