Well I might as well throw my unknown hat into the ring. There was/is/has been a buzz around the Microsoft SQL Server community about the idea of "SQL Family". Well I am the first one to say that I am anything but active in the community, I have been known to call on family members for help. I am not even sure if I can say that I am a part of this family, part of the community, sure.
Like most lurkers I have the sqlhelp hash tag as a column in my TweetDeck. I try to offer advice where I am almost fairly certain I won't stick my foot in my mouth (which is few and far between the offering of help, not the sticking of feet in mouth)). This is somewhat a tragedy of the commons, as a few people are always there to offer help where need to the majority. I do feel a bit bad about abusing the help being offered.
I'm not even sure I belong, since being a DBA is only a portion of my job description. The main part consist of being a systems administrator. Do I still count for being a part of "the family"? I like being a sys admin, I like being a DBA I know at one point soon I'll have to choose between the two, as a person can only do one thing well, or multiple things in a mediocre manner.
I'd like to get more involved in the SQL community, however my wife and I just had our first son little under 4 months ago. Free time is something I only have at work...I kid, I am always busy at work. Time and monetary resources are a bit short at the moment. The most involvement that I can muster is to troll the dba.stackexchange board, and that's not even MSSQL centric.
So for now, I'll sit on the side lines and every now and then add my two cents.
Everyone has something to add. Even novices can catch something that a trained and grizzled pro can't really catch. I've always said that there is a forest-thru-the-trees problem especially for people who have been doing something for very very long. You consider yourself an expert up until the day when some new person comes along and solves the problem you have been wrestling with not with their own expertness but rather with their fresh eyes and different viewpoint. It's one of the many reasons why you never tread on new people, they often have novel ways of approaching problems and that's golden as far as I'm concerned. :)
ReplyDeleteI totally understand your point. Sometimes it is hard for someone to put themselves out there. So they might have the right answer, but don't want the risk of being made fun of, or talked down to by the grizzled pros of which you speak.
ReplyDeleteIt is a fine line, and I'm just trying to walk it.