An Interesting Point of View

I ran across an interesting blog today and in the absence of some new thought I decided to let Dave Rodabaugh's new blog give you a differing point of view as he is a SQL Server pro and has some interesting thoughts.

I really liked his blog post on interview/recruiting questions.  This is something we all struggle with.

Comments

[Dave Rodabaugh]

Thanks for the reference! As my blog says, I'm drinking the blue Kool-Aid. I've been doing Microsoft-based BI for six years now, and the tools are finally maturing to something that genuinely provides end-to-end functionality.

You spoke in a previous post about passionate users. As you can tell by the five posts I wrote on Analysis Services interview questions, I believe that passionate technolgists are just as important. In a field where we get paid for what we know and what we will know, I cannot understand the general learning malaise that grips college-educated people in our field. Learning doesn't stop when you have your diploma, which is why I interview candidates the way I do.

This transcends platform, of course. I worked once with an Informatica "expert" who didn't really understand how inner and outer joins worked, and made two key product feature mistakes during an ill-fated engagement. Guess who caught the errors? I did, and I had never really used Informatica. I caught the errors because his assertions didn't stand up to a basic intellectual sniff test; that is, he advocated a couple of things that made absolutely no sense to me based on experience. I used a set of assmuptions to made an educated guess, based on things that were probably true regardless of software platform. Then I researched to see if I was correct, and I was. That's good lesson learning and he wasn't very good at it.

Passion is about being RIGHT as often as possible, where "right" is a carefully crafted term meaning "solve the problem well with only the correct amount of effort and money." It's about reading design philosophies, deciding which one is right, and following through with architectural and development techniques that are true to your decision. That's a *reasoned* and passionate approach to what we do, not a techical holy war, and it displays strong character and work ethic to all of your clients. This form of technical leadership creates passionate users.

[Stephen]

Dave: Thanks for joining in. I like how you ended with a balance of *reasoned* passion. It is so difficult when we drink our cool-aid no matter the colour to still be able to be both practicle and reasoned. I often avoid talking about some of these things because it does become a holy war and I am not a fan of those things.

As long as the pre-dispositions are set up-front and there is good effort to be objective and respectful to the clients needs then the more passion the better.

[Stephen]

Then again I should mention that sometimes my passion gets the best of me. Take a listen to the CoffeeCAST from a couple of weeks ago and you will see some of my passions.
:)

[online computer repair service]

This seems like the most comprehensive blog on this niche