Good hiring practices are vital for any organization. As you move up in ranks, you’ll be given more influence and authority in hiring situations. Unfortunately, most organizations offer no training on how to effectively hire the best candidate nor do they have a formalized policy on how to conduct hiring. The larger your organization, the more likely it is to have a formalized hiring process and well-defined roles for HR and for the hiring manager. Even when the HR department (if it exists) is helpful and has good intentions, they often bring little to the hiring process except to weed out the worst candidates, for example, those candidates who don’t meet the minimum requirements or have misrepresented themselves on their application. It will be up to you and your teammates to find the best candidates.
While many organizations lack a formal hiring process, they all have informal processes, some of which can be effective and others, well, not so much. The more informal the process, the more you can exert influence to modify the process (if any changes are needed). In any event, there are several major choices a team must make when conducting interviews:
Interview question style: biographical, technical, or behavioral
Team involvement: manager-only, manager and team, delegated team
Interview format: one-to-one, one-to-many
Each of these different choices is intended to fill specific communicating gaps and team needs that inevitably occur between interviewers and interviewed. For example, in some organizations hiring might be done only by the manager because the team is too busy to spare an extra hour or two for interviewing or perhaps too junior to bring much to the discussion. On the other hand, bringing in the team to assist with interviews can help ensure a much better “fit” with the team and also give the team members a chance to catch issues that might otherwise have escaped the manager’s eye. Team interviewing can also reduce the chances that a manager hires “yes” people.
Does this resume make me look fat?
In the same line of thought, you might choose to subject your candidate to several sequential interviews with each important member of the team or instead choose to let the candidate face an interview board of several team members at once. The former route consumes more time in total, than the latter but is usually less intimidating to the job candidate.
While these choices are extremely important, the other essential element of a good hiring process that I should mention in this primer is setting the candidate’s expectations. It is essential that the candidate know before ever setting foot in your office:
The duration of the interview(s).
The format of the interview.
The people s/he will be speaking with. (It’s ok to tell them only the roles without the specific person’s names, e.g. “You’ll be meeting with the team lead, the manager, and two senior developers on the team.”)
You’ll also want to make sure that HR (or if not HR, then you personally) have a packet of HR-related information on hand for the candidate. This should be offered very early in the interview process because you want the interaction between the candidate and the team to be about the job and what a successful candidate will bring to the organization, not about questions such as “How much vacation do I get?”.
In next three weeks, I’ll delve deeper into each of the three major areas of conducting an interview and the benefits and drawbacks to each approach.
In the meantime, I welcome your questions and interesting stories about the hiring process.
Obviously, the angst over the 2010 PASS elections still lives on for some, and some of you are probably ready to move on to more immediate concerns, but as for me, I’m stuck here trying to figure out what I should learn from all of this. I do think we as a community need to move forward, and to that end, I’ve agreed to participate in Kevin Kline’s series on the PASS elections process, and answer the following question:
“Many in the community seem to think that the PASS election process is badly broken. Do you think that PASS needs to implement fundamental and far-reaching changes to its election process, or does it only need some fine tuning? Please explain your thoughts?”
Learning from the experience…
I don’t want to keep rehashing the past, because it’s been done (here, here, here, and here, to name a few; if you want a LOT more reading material, the elections site has a bunch of blog entries). While there are lots of lessons to be learned, and ideas to be discussed, I think there are two key points that are not stressed enough:
Our discourse as a community has been healthy, and
Nobody involved in the process has walked away clean.
For the first point, I think we’ve been able to keep our disagreements civil; there have been some comments made from several key contributors to the discussion that have been more cutting than others, and I have said some things that I should have kept to myself, but all in all, I don’t think we’ve burned any bridges that can’t be rebuilt. The only lingering meme that continues to bother me is the occasional “community-vs.-PASS” theme that is implied in some of the discussions; I’ll talk more about why that bothers me in a bit, but I fear we too easily fall into the trap of needing to define an invisible “Them” to be an antithesis to our “We”. We is Them, and They are We.
The second point was driven home to me like a dagger to the heart in a response from Andy Warren to a dialogue in the comments section of Brent Ozar’s post on the issue:
Agreeing to disagree is seldom satisfying, but often necessary. I’m entirely biased about my views on this, but I think it’s easy to forget the pain that continues along with this discussion. Replace the name of SJ with yours, and imagine how it would feel to be left off the slate (fairly, unfairly or otherwise), and then have a conversation continue that seems to imply a great failure during the interview, but no details emerge. Do you defend yourself or lay low? What if you allow the inner details to be published, but they are not?
We don’t agree on the way things worked out. Ok. I think we should let things heal a little more, then have the values and process conversation that we should have had last year – one that I’ve admitted I should have helped to make happen. Yell at me. Yell at the process. But I think we’re at the point where we leave a good man to tend his wounds and we try to do better next year, or we have the entire conversation and let the chips fall where they way on each side. I vote for moving forward.
Not my place to tell you not to talk about it, and much of this has been good conversation. But please remember my friend is not an abstraction. Actually, I wish I could say that better. I know that you don’t he is an abstraction, but I’m not sure that this conversation, right now, helps any of us.
I’ve been so busy defending what I perceived to be attacks on the character of the Nom Com or the quality of my work that I’ve forgotten what it must be like to be in Steve’s place, and for that I’m truly sorry. I don’t regret my choice to point out what I think are inaccurate statements about the process, but I should have tempered my comments with more grace than I did. That being said, I think we all need to step back and realize that nobody was completely happy with this year’s election process; obviously, the controversy was not a desired outcome by anyone on the Nom Com, the Board, or the membership at large. So how do we fix the process moving forward?
Is the process irreparably broken?
Short answer: No.
Longer answer: I think if you look at any business that has an electable Board of Directors, the nominations process is similar; the Board appoints a committee to find qualified candidates, and then votes to approve or reject the slate. The elections process should be simple, but fair; I don’t think that a Board of an organization need be run like the federal government (with election cycles dictating workflow). That being said, I think there are lots of opportunities to tweak the process, and learn from our mistakes.
Tweak 1: Standardize the qualifications for a Director
I think PASS made strides this year, but there should be very specific minimum requirements for a seat at the table. Andy Leonard and K. Brian Kelley both made excellent points about the inadequacy of using a ranking system to evaluate certain concrete measures like Education and References. If we must use a ranking system, then the criteria for the ranks need to be carefully defined, like so:
Applicant must have a Bachelor’s Degree (or equivalent University degree).
Add 1 point for a Master’s Degree in any subject.
Add 1 point for a Doctorate Degree in any subject.
Please note that the above example is merely intended to illustrate specific ranking criteria; the definition of Education itself warrants more discussion than I have time for in this post.
Experience with PASS is another great example of a objective measure that needs standard ranking; how long have you been a member? What volunteer roles have you performed? Is experience as a chapter leader more or less valuable than experience on the Program Committee? Whatever standards are chosen, they should be well-defined and applied evenly from year to year; if an applicant doesn’t change their behavior from year to year (i.e., an applicant with little PASS experience in year 1 doesn’t get involved in year 2), they should have the same score.
Applications should be made available to the public, as well as the ranking using the standardized questionnaire described above; the general members of PASS should feel confident that the scoring system used to evaluate an application reflects the applicant’s ability to meet the minimum requirements.
However, I think that discussions within the Nominations Committee, including interviews with the applicants, should remain opaque: a black box. I know others think that the Nom Com should be completely transparent, but I think that the job of the Nom Com is to probe areas beyond the minimum qualification, and in order to do so, the members of that group need the ability to ask questions that may not be appropriate for general consumption. I think this protects both the applicants and the volunteer interviewers (what if I, as a volunteer, were to ask a really stupid question? Should I be vilified on the Internet by the membership?). But here’s the rub: the interviews need to be recorded.
The interviews should NEVER be released to the general membership, but once the slate has been presented to the Board of Directors for approval or rejection, the interview tapes need to be included as part of the recommendation in order to give the Board full insight into why the Nom Com chose to recommend or deny certain candidates. The board should then accept or reject the slate, and if they choose to reject the slate, decide how they’re going to move forward; the discussions surrounding the slate should not be released, but the vote should. That way, if the general membership felt that the process was unfair, they could contact the Board members and move forward with resolving the issue.
Tweak 3: Maximize member involvement
I think one of the hardest problems to tackle in this discussion is the issue of member involvement; as I mentioned earlier, the theme of “community vs. PASS” is a difficult pill for me to swallow because I see every member of PASS (including the Board) as member of the community. I also realize (as a chapter leader) that there are many members of the community which are not PASS members, and members of both subsets that are not active in many of the social networks that were abuzz with concerns over the process.
Let me back up and clarify: I’m a chapter leader for AtlantaMDF, and at one point, we had nearly 1500 SQL Server Professionals on our private mailing list. These were people who at one point had registered for a meeting of ours; I’d consider them member of the community. Are they PASS members? Maybe. Are they active on twitter, or active bloggers? Dunno; my experience presenting on these topics leads me to believe that the vast majority of SQL Server Professionals are NOT involved in social networking. Kendra Little had a similar take on the problem of uninvolved membership (I stole the graph from her):
Voting stats from the last few elections would probably back up this idea; although I don’t remember the actual numbers, I do remember thinking that the voter turnout was abysmal compared to the number of people that PASS claims as members (remember that membership is free). Sort of like the same feeling I get when I think that AtlantaMDF invites 1500 people every month to come to a meeting, and 75 do; I’m grateful we got 75, but we’re missing a lot of interaction from 1425 other people.
So how do we involve the membership? I think that Chapter Leaders (including Virtual Chapter Leaders) should be randomly selected and asked to serve on the Nom Com every election cycle, and the number of Chapter Leaders should always outweigh the number of Board seats by at least 1. Why Chapter Leaders? To me, they represent the local faces of PASS, and are the most likely ones to understand the pulse of the community. Why not bloggers, tweeters, or columnists? Although I think that social networkers provide a great service to the community, they don’t necessarily have an official relationship with PASS. PASS serves the community, but I think the election process needs to be membership driven.
Involving the membership via Chapter Leaders on the Nom Com should (I hope) instill some trust in the process, even if the interview process yields an unpopular result. It’s a lot harder to accuse the Nom Com of predetermining the outcome of an interview because of their ties to the Board if the Nom Com consists of a majority of non-Board members.
Summing up.
I have several other ideas (such as the possibility of a Chapter Congress), but many of them require drastic overhauls of how PASS does business; that’s simply not feasible. I think many of the problems of the last two elections can be easily resolved with a few minor tweaks. However, the first step is the conversation, and that conversation needs to begin well before the election season. It’s easy to be upset about the outcome, but in order for real change to occur, we (the community) need to step up and participate in the conversations. I am eagerly awaiting the chance; are you?
Much has been voiced about the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) Nominating Committee’s decision to not put Steve Jones (blog, twitter) on the ballot for this year’s Board of Directors election. I’ve watched this controversy unfold with great interest, biting my tongue to keep from making rash or reactionary comments one way or the other.
I’m currently working on a guest blog post for a series that Kevin Kline (blog, twitter) is starting on the election process. In the coming days my guest post will appear on my site and on Kevin’s blog. I’m hopeful that Kevin’s series will help to provide some good, creative, and perhaps even actionable discussion around the PASS election process.
In the meantime, there has been one aspect of the brouhaha that I’d like to call attention to that may not be immediately obvious – the passion we all have for the community.
Aw, Come On Man!
It’s been said that the opposite of love is not hate; it’s apathy. Love and hate are strong emotions. If you love someone or something, you do it with a passion. Likewise if you hate something, you have a certain fervor about it. Whether there is love or hate, strong emotions abound and you care deeply about it.
Where there’s apathy, though, there is a lack of caring, a lack of passion or fervor. There’s an emptiness and the once loved/hated object ceases to have relevance in your life. It’s a sad state, apathy.
If nothing else, the latest PASS controversy has proven that people in the community have deep-seated emotions about PASS. It’s shown that PASS is a relevant and important player in the SQL community.
So in that respect, I’m glad that this election debate has stirred emotions and passion in most people in the community. If it hadn’t, I’d have been really worried about PASS and the community as a whole.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Now let’s see if we can turn this into a positive experience that, while difficult to go through, makes PASS and the community a stronger and more vibrant place.
Look for a post with my opinion on the election process soon. After that, I’ll get back to the “So I Got Promoted, Now What?” series.
People have been screaming from rooftops for a month now about the PASS election process, ever since a beloved member of our SQL Server community was shunned in his bid to run for the PASS Board of Directors. The community has reacted vocally. PASS has reacted defensively. And unfortunately much of the back and forth has been speaking “at” each other rather than “with” each other.
Watching this has been almost as bad as watching someone burn bacon! Almost.
Kevin Kline (blog, twitter) has asked a number of leaders in the community to participate in the discussion through a series of guest posts on his blog. I believe that he’s trying is to bring the various sides together in a constructive way. With all of this passion in the community, we should be able to improve things. This is my contribution to the series.
Before going further, however, I’d like to first frame the discussion by describing the essentials of the debate as I see them. There are certainly a lot of nuances, however insomuch as the different facets can have one voice, I’ve tried to capture that. There will be, of course, deeper issues and varying opinions. And it’s entirely possible that I’ve missed the point altogether.
The Community Side
Steve Jones (blog, twitter) has proven himself time and again to be a staunch advocate for the community. His qualifications for community leadership are unmatched.
He’s a renowned SQL Server expert and Microsoft MVP
He has the media experience that PASS once coveted
He’s a good businessman with a proven track record of success
He’s a polished speaker and regular blogger
He frequently donates his time at conferences, SQLSaturdays, and User Group meetings
He’s wildly popular in the community
Steve would easily navigate the Nominating Committee (NomCom) and most certainly be elected. So I thought when I wrote a recommendation letter that accompanied his application.
Like most in the community, I was utterly shocked when I learned that he didn’t make the final cut. Many, if not most, in the community were outraged. And rightfully so. The NomCom rejected someone that the community obviously wanted, someone who would most certainly have been elected if allowed to be on the ballot.
But, this isn’t about Steve. This isn’t even about the election. This is about PASS putting itself before the community that it supposedly represents.
The PASS Side
For the past few years, PASS has taken quite a bit of heat from the community to be more transparent in its processes and decision making. The community doesn’t want a benevolent dictator; it wants peers who are willing to lead on our behalf because we don’t have the time or inclination . That message was made clear years ago.
Since then, PASS has worked really hard in this area and has made clear progress in many, many ways. Its finances are posted for all to see. Unabridged meeting minutes are published on the web just a few days after each board meeting. More of the board members and key volunteers blog about their PASS activities than ever before. We asked for transparency and we’re getting it. All we have to do is log on and look at the information as it’s made available.
The NomCom, which has bore the brunt of the community’s ire for the election controversy, is a prime example of the newfound transparency. The NomCom is charged with vetting each candidate and presenting a slate before the board. Before the NomCom was formed, the procedures and guidelines under which it was to operate were created and distributed for review. After a series of reforms and tweaks, the NomCom was given its marching orders and asked to do their job.
After weeks of work, the NomCom, a group of our peers that we’ve entrusted to do the grueling grunt work for us, reached a conclusion using the formulas and procedures given it. The NomCom members realized that their conclusion would be questioned and controversial. And they paused to reflect on that.
The question: Should the NomCom discard the quantitative results and replace them with on its own subjective feelings? Should it do what it felt the community really wanted by disposing of the pesky procedures that had been so carefully refined?
To do that would have really opened the doors to allegations of PASS being an old-boy-network . To discard the rules at its own discretion and pick the candidate it thought best would be the height arrogance.
The NomCom was in a pickle. Stick with the approved procedure and eliminate a popular candidate? Or dispense with the approved procedures and make a subjective call? You can’t win with those as your two options.
So they made the call to accept the wrath they they knew was sure to come. They stuck to the approved procedures set forth in the NomCom’s mandate. The integrity of the process is too important to toss it aside. It would be a huge step backward in the quest for transparency to do anything else.
I thank the members of NomCom for serving. I also commend them for doing what they believed to be the right thing even though they knew it may not be popular. That takes guts. It takes character. It takes integrity.
And it’s people who possess those characteristics that we want leading the community.
So Who’s Right?
To me the answer is obvious: both sides are right. On the one hand, I’m very frustrated that the candidate for whom I wanted to vote wasn’t on the ballot. I cast my ballot yesterday and it felt a bit hollow.
Yet I would have been equally, if not more, angered if the established process had been subverted to put Steve on the ballot at the expense of one of the other candidates.
The NomCom is not at fault here. The PASS Board is not at fault here.
At fault here are the procedures that governed the election process. I have every confidence that those procedures were far better than in prior years. Yet in this case, as extreme as it may be, they fell woefully short.
Where Do We Go From Here?
I think that the one thing on which we can agree is that we don’t want to find ourselves in this predicament twelve or twenty-four months from now. We want to learn from this, take corrective action, and move forward.
So what do we need to do to ensure that this doesn’t happen again?
Acknowledge that it was the process that failed and stop pointing fingers at our peers
Take heart that we have a slate full of good candidates even if our preferred candidate was left out
Accept partial responsibility for the community and get more involved
Should we throw the baby out with the bathwater and dispense with the NomCom? I don’t think so, but it’s a conversation that should take place.
Should we refine the existing procedures to handle situations like this? We must be careful in codifying too many things since situations will arise in the future where flexibility is required.
We need to have these conversations.
A Note About Transparency
Many years ago when Kevin Kline was the VP of Finance for PASS and I was Director of Logistics, we shared a cab to the airport after a Community Summit event. During the ride, we talked. I remember telling him that as a member of Ducks Unlimited, I receive an annual financial statement from the conservancy. It contains detailed information about the group’s finances. Knowing that makes me feel good about giving to the group.
I commented that as Directors of PASS, we should provide that kind of information to our members. And if we are not comfortable delivering that level of detail, we should do something about our finances so that we are comfortable with it. It took a while, but we did. We changed management companies and implemented a lot of other changes for the better. We took the first of many steps toward better fiscal and procedural transparency.
PASS is no longer a monolith that speaks with one voice. It has truly made great strides toward being a group of our friends and colleagues who are willing to freely give of themselves for our benefit. That’s not to say that PASS has completed its journey toward transparency. It hasn’t, but it is much further down the road than it was just a few short years ago when Kevin and I had that conversation.
And this is another opportunity to further refine the way PASS works, for the better.
People have been screaming from rooftops for a month now about the PASS election process, ever since a beloved member of our SQL Server community was shunned in his bid to run for the PASS Board of Directors. The community has reacted vocally. PASS has reacted defensively. And unfortunately much of the back and forth has been speaking “at” each other rather than “with” each other.Watching this has been almost as bad as watching someone burn bacon! Almost.
Kevin Kline (blog, twitter) has asked a number of leaders in the community to participate in the discussion through a series of guest posts on his blog. I believe that he’s trying is to bring the various sides together in a constructive way. With all of this passion in the community, we should be able to improve things. This is my contribution to the series.
Before going further, however, I’d like to first frame the discussion by describing the essentials of the debate as I see them. There are certainly a lot of nuances, however insomuch as the different facets can have one voice, I’ve tried to capture that. There will be, of course, deeper issues and varying opinions. And it’s entirely possible that I’ve missed the point altogether.
The Community Side
Steve Jones (blog, twitter) has proven himself time and again to be a staunch advocate for the community. His qualifications for community leadership are unmatched.
He’s a renowned SQL Server expert and Microsoft MVP
He has the media experience that PASS once coveted
He’s a good businessman with a proven track record of success
He’s a polished speaker and regular blogger
He frequently donates his time at conferences, SQLSaturdays, and User Group meetings
He’s wildly popular in the community
Steve would easily navigate the Nominating Committee (NomCom) and most certainly be elected. So I thought when I wrote a recommendation letter that accompanied his application.
Like most in the community, I was utterly shocked when I learned that he didn’t make the final cut. Many, if not most, in the community were outraged. And rightfully so. The NomCom rejected someone that the community obviously wanted, someone who would most certainly have been elected if allowed to be on the ballot.
But, this isn’t about Steve. This isn’t even about the election. This is about PASS putting itself before the community that it supposedly represents.
The PASS Side
For the past few years, PASS has taken quite a bit of heat from the community to be more transparent in its processes and decision making. The community doesn’t want a benevolent dictator; it wants peers who are willing to lead on our behalf because we don’t have the time or inclination . That message was made clear years ago.
Since then, PASS has worked really hard in this area and has made clear progress in many, many ways. Its finances are posted for all to see. Unabridged meeting minutes are published on the web just a few days after each board meeting. More of the board members and key volunteers blog about their PASS activities than ever before. We asked for transparency and we’re getting it. All we have to do is log on and look at the information as it’s made available.
The NomCom, which has bore the brunt of the community’s ire for the election controversy, is a prime example of the newfound transparency. The NomCom is charged with vetting each candidate and presenting a slate before the board. Before the NomCom was formed, the procedures and guidelines under which it was to operate were created and distributed for review. After a series of reforms and tweaks, the NomCom was given its marching orders and asked to do their job.
After weeks of work, the NomCom, a group of our peers that we’ve entrusted to do the grueling grunt work for us, reached a conclusion using the formulas and procedures given it. The NomCom members realized that their conclusion would be questioned and controversial. And they paused to reflect on that.
The question: Should the NomCom discard the quantitative results and replace them with on its own subjective feelings? Should it do what it felt the community really wanted by disposing of the pesky procedures that had been so carefully refined?
To do that would have really opened the doors to allegations of PASS being an old-boy-network . To discard the rules at its own discretion and pick the candidate it thought best would be the height arrogance.
The NomCom was in a pickle. Stick with the approved procedure and eliminate a popular candidate? Or dispense with the approved procedures and make a subjective call? You can’t win with those as your two options.
So they made the call to accept the wrath they they knew was sure to come. They stuck to the approved procedures set forth in the NomCom’s mandate. The integrity of the process is too important to toss it aside. It would be a huge step backward in the quest for transparency to do anything else.
I thank the members of NomCom for serving. I also commend them for doing what they believed to be the right thing even though they knew it may not be popular. That takes guts. It takes character. It takes integrity.
And it’s people who possess those characteristics that we want leading the community.
So Who’s Right?
To me the answer is obvious: both sides are right. On the one hand, I’m very frustrated that the candidate for whom I wanted to vote wasn’t on the ballot. I cast my ballot yesterday and it felt a bit hollow.
Yet I would have been equally, if not more, angered if the established process had been subverted to put Steve on the ballot at the expense of one of the other candidates.
The NomCom is not at fault here. The PASS Board is not at fault here.
At fault here are the procedures that governed the election process. I have every confidence that those procedures were far better than in prior years. Yet in this case, as extreme as it may be, they fell woefully short.
Where Do We Go From Here?
I think that the one thing on which we can agree is that we don’t want to find ourselves in this predicament twelve or twenty-four months from now. We want to learn from this, take corrective action, and move forward.
So what do we need to do to ensure that this doesn’t happen again?
Acknowledge that it was the process that failed and stop pointing fingers at our peers
Take heart that we have a slate full of good candidates even if our preferred candidate was left out
Accept partial responsibility for the community and get more involved
Should we throw the baby out with the bathwater and dispense with the NomCom? I don’t think so, but it’s a conversation that should take place.
Should we refine the existing procedures to handle situations like this? We must be careful in codifying too many things since situations will arise in the future where flexibility is required.
We need to have these conversations.
A Note About Transparency
Many years ago when Kevin Kline was the VP of Finance for PASS and I was Director of Logistics, we shared a cab to the airport after a Community Summit event. During the ride, we talked. I remember telling him that as a member of Ducks Unlimited, I receive an annual financial statement from the conservancy. It contains detailed information about the group’s finances. Knowing that makes me feel good about giving to the group.
I commented that as Directors of PASS, we should provide that kind of information to our members. And if we are not comfortable delivering that level of detail, we should do something about our finances so that we are comfortable with it. It took a while, but we did. We changed management companies and implemented a lot of other changes for the better. We took the first of many steps toward better fiscal and procedural transparency.
PASS is no longer a monolith that speaks with one voice. It has truly made great strides toward being a group of our friends and colleagues who are willing to freely give of themselves for our benefit. That’s not to say that PASS has completed its journey toward transparency. It hasn’t, but it is much further down the road than it was just a few short years ago when Kevin and I had that conversation.
And this is another opportunity to further refine the way PASS works, for the better.
I wanted to pass along this great info from Microsoft. There are literally oodles of free resources for Visual Studio programmers. In their own words…
Take Visual Studio for a Test Drive
Take this powerful tool and its features for a spin by downloading a full Visual Studio 2010 trial version. Discover how Visual Studio 2010 Professional helps individual developers build, test, debug software solutions. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/206383954/direct/01/
Attend an Event
Find out how you can ride the next wave of innovation ushered in by Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. Choose from full day, in-person Launch 2010 events in your area, or live half day Highlights events, featuring the most popular sessions from the Launch 2010 Technical Readiness Series. http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9725716
Visit the Visual Studio 2010 Developer Center
Find out how easy it is to get started with Visual Studio 2010. Get invaluable resources like “How do I” videos, MSDN Magazine, product and extension information, and much more. http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9725715
Watch a “How Do I” Visual Studio Video
Watch the “How Do I Videos” designed for Visual Studio 2010 developers, from novice to professional. This set of short videos will help guide you through common scenarios, features and functionalities. http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9727009
Attend a Visual Studio Webcast — Turn Ideas Into Solutions
Dive into these live and on-demand webcasts and learn how the features available in Visual Studio 2010 can make professional developers more productive while building high-quality applications. Dive in today! http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9727010
More Visual Studio Videos
Watch these free videos to explore Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 whenever and from wherever you want — just click, watch, and learn. Start by clicking the title to learn more about the video, you can then stream it or download to view offline. http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9727011
Download a Podcast
Listen to podcasts and learn about Visual Studio 2010 whenever and wherever you want. Download the latest audio content and hear about new features and enhancements that help developers build next generation applications. http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9727012
Visual Studio Virtual Labs
Virtual labs that you can download and learn how to program with Visual Studio. Using virtual labs is simple with no complex setup or installation required. http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9727013
Video chat with Brent Ozar and SQL Server MVPs Kevin Kline, Hilary Cotter and Geoff Hiten to talk about how SQL Server 2008 addresses DBA challenges and pain points. In this webcast, we cover features like Transparent Data Encryption, spatial data, and other new things that really differentiate SQL Server 2008 from 2005.
Good grief, there’s a lot of travel in my immediate future. <sigh … deep breath> It’ll be exhausting and it’ll be hard to lose so much time with the family. But if I’m able to avoid travel mishaps, it’ll be fun.
The Gateway to the West
Meet Me In St. Louis
I’ll be speaking in St. Louis, MO on Tuesday, September 14th for their mid-day meeting. The details, as I have them, are:
Tuesday, September 14, 2010 1-4pm
Location: Microsoft St. Louis Office, Three City Place Drive, Suite 1100, St. Louis, MO 63141 http://www.microsoft.com/about/companyinformation/usaoffices/northcentral/stlouis.mspx
Parking is in the garage behind / next to the building. There is an entrance to the building from the 2nd floor in the garage. Additional details and instructions on how to log in
Speaker: Kevin Kline, Quest Software
Topic: SQL Server Internals and Architecture
Speaker: Kevin Kline, Quest Software
Topic: SQL Statement Tuning with Query Optimizer Strategies
I’ll be giving away free t-shirts, posters, an eBook or three, and backrubs (super-models, only).
SQL Bits, On the Cheap
SQL Bits in the City of York Minster Cathedral
I’ve tweeted previously about the SQL Bits conference in York on September 30th – October 2nd, but this is my first blog post about it. Now is the time to settle your plans to attend. And while you’re settling those plans, take advantage of Quest Software’s 20% discount on the Thursday and Friday sessions requiring payment. Just be sure to use the code QST20 when you register.
The Saturday is free for everyone. Note – I said FREE. So if you’re struggling to convince your boss of the value of the time off and cost required to attend these events, then at least plan to attend Saturday. But as you can see here, the prices are quite low compared to most other conferences of similar quality.
I firmly believe the standard for speakers and content at SQLBits is second to none in the UK. I’ll be a wallflower in comparison to other friends of mine also speaking at the event, such as Brent Ozar, a MCM SQL Server and former colleague now working with SQLSkills, Buck Woody, the well-known “Real World DBA” and senior technical specialist from Microsoft, as well as many other SQL Server MVPs, authors, and speakers, such as the event organizer, Simon Sabin, and Quest Software SQL Server expert and editor-in-chief of SQLServerPedia, Iain Kick. Some sessions I’m looking forward to include:
Monitoring and Tuning Parallel Query Execution – Part II – R Meyyappan
Where the bl**dy h*** are you? (Spatial Data Visualisation) - Rob Farley (all the way from Adelaide, Australia)
Introduction to Performance Analysis and Tuning – Simon Sabin
Oracle for SQL Server DBAs – Gavin Payne
Lies, Damned Lies And Statistics. Making The Most Out of SQL Server Statistics – Maciej Pilecki
Extreme scaling with SQL Azure – Martin Schmidt
Automating SSIS – Andre Kamman
Attendance will definitely enhance your skills and ability to do your job. The added bonus is that York is a lovely place to visit with a beautiful and storied cathedral, so I highly recommend the event for all SQL Server professionals.
Prior to SQLBits, I’ll be presenting in London, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and Stockholm. I hope you can attend an event closer to you if you cannot make it to York!
And Just to Make Sure I’m Thoroughly Frozen…
I prefer to think that the city will look like this with nary a flake of snow in sight
While I usually have a policy against visiting places cold enough to die between the front door and the mailbox, I’ll be stopping in at SQL Saturday 58 in Minnesota for a SQL Saturday taking place on Friday (not a typo), October 29th, the day after my birthday. I’ll be 21 years old and, since I’m now of legal drinking age, you should by me a drink. The event organizer, as well as my friend and fellow MVP, Jason Strate, just has to be different by holding the event on a Friday, eh? Track the event on twitter using the hash tag #sqlsat58.
In a two-part article over the next two months, I’m going to address an important issue for the SQL Server community: the future direction of coding for SQL Server, as directed by Microsoft. I’ll start by telling you a bit about the current situation with writing code on and for SQL Server, and, in the next installment, talk more about the ramifications brought on by the current coding environment.
I’m curious if you agree with my assertions. You also have the added advantage of hindsight, since I wrote these a while ago.
We all know how hard troubleshooting SQL Server can be. There are tools and techniques that can make troubleshooting much easier, such as the Windows System Monitor.
The only problem with SysMon, or more commonly “PerfMon”, is that it takes a lot of knowledge and experience to know which objects and counters to examine.
I’ve put together a nice poster for you covering all of the important PerfMon counters for SQL Server troubleshooting, with a little help from some of my friends: Brent Ozar, Bob Ward, Christian Bolton, and Raoul Illyes.
You Can Has It Fer Free!
If you live outside of North America, get the hi-resolution PDF here.
If you live in North America, order the poster here, and it’s free including postage anywhere in the USA and Canada.
PerfMon is Irie, Mon!
But Wait There’s More!
And just in case you didn’t watch our virtual conferences back in March or in July, you can watch my “PerfMon is Irie, Mon” session that describes how to use Windows System Monitor and some related tools, all in my rasta-man costume.
Order a free copy of the events on CD here. Restrictions apply.
Do I have a dog in this Fight? If I did, it'd be the Warner Brothers Barnyard Dog.
After my term of service on the PASS board of directors ended in December of 2009, I fully intended to stay far, far out of the way. It’s an intention that I’ve largely been able to fulfill,excluding the odd conversation with an occasional board member or committee chair looking for a little impartial advice when weighing some consideration or other.
If you keep up with going’s on within PASS, then you’ll know that there’s been some hullabaloo lately. Please reference paragraph 1 again at this point to understand that I don’t really know much about all this hullabaloo. (I read one blog post by Stuart Ainsworth and decided to henceforth avoid all other mention of the situation). I mentioned that I’ve been trying to stay out of PASS’ way, correct? But sometimes you just can’t dodge a bullet, even when you’re bustin’ out some Matrix-like moves and goin’ all Neo/Keanu Reeves on it.
To wit, I was happy to volunteer in hosting our first Music City SQL Saturday, which also happened to occur the day after the PASS board of directors wrapped up their quarterly meeting here in beautiful (and hot) Nashville, TN. The two events were destined by the stars to overlap. Which also meant I was going to be hearing about said hullabaloo (reference paragraph 2, above), despite my better efforts to get out of its (the hullabaloo’s) way.
(I’m being a bit disingenuous about being surprised that these events having some overlap. I hosted a party at my house the Friday before our SQL Saturday for our event speakers and also invited all of the PASS directors and staff who were still in town as well. So they were all coming together, like neutrons hurtling towards a chunk of uranium 236. You DO KNOW what happens when neutrons are hurtled at uranium 236, right?).
Yeah, and then what?
Foghorn's idea of a dog fight
So despite trying to steer clear any PASS-related controversies, I’m compelled to speak up, albeit in as limited a fashion as I can manage. Most of the people involved, from candidates to committee members, are friends. I wrote endorsement letters for almost half of the candidates who made it to the Nomination Committee (NomCom) interview stage. So I’m far from being a totally impartial judge of how individual persons were treated. But, for what it’s worth, I’m trying to make my post less about personalities and more about the overall direction of the process. In other words, I’m trying to be constructive, not destructive.
A lot of people have put out opinions about the PASS Election process and you can read more yourself here:
Since the call to vote is now open, I hope you’ll take some time to get informed about the overall process as well as the candidates standing for election.
So what’s your point?
Lots of people have complained about lots of things in this round of elections (so far), but what’s anyone going to do about it? Well, my point in this and subsequent blog posts is to produce recommendations about the election process that will better it for PASS and the wider community.
I’ve asked several friends in the SQL Server community, as well as individuals unrelated to PASS or SQL Server but who have experience on corporate boards of directors, to join a group discussion focusing on the question:
Tit-for-Tat, eh Foghorn?
“Many in the community seem to think that the PASS election process is badly broken. Do you think that PASS needs to implement fundamental and far-reaching changes to its election process, or does it only need some fine tuning? Please explain your thoughts?”
So now that some of the personal aspects of the discussions have calmed down, the main point I want to make is that we can make this better. But this will take a concerted and focused discussion to decide on the consensus.
Guest posters are waiting in the wings. Let the discussions begin!
To forward this discussions, I’ve asked guest posters to make open with their initial thoughts on their own blogs or here, for those who don’t have their own blogs. Some have already posted their opening thoughts, which I will repost here. Once the opening statements are all posted, we’ll begin to work through the various points and topics (refer to the PASS discussion forums above) to see if we can drive consensus for concrete methods and steps for the nominations and election processes.
With that, you’re also invited to participate. If you have thoughts around process (not personalities), I invite you to participate either through posting comments here and on our future posts and, if you’re interested, to participate as a guest poster yourself.
