I wonder if he'll still be here next Monday?



  • We got approval to hire an additional DBA. Joy.

    We found a good one. Joy.

    He accepted the job. Joy.

    HR forgot to tell us his start date. Uh oh.

    It's Monday at 9:30 AM. He shows up raring to go. My boss had no idea he was starting this week. There is no phone, laptop, chair or desk. My boss tells him to get some coffee and go read the paper in the kitchen. For the rest of the week.

    Why didn't we put him in some desk that's empty for the day?

    a) We have more folks than desks, so we're on a permanent rotating schedule, and sharing desks. There are no empty desks

    b) Even if there was an empty desk, there are no extra laptops that he could borrow to look at a schema diagram. I printed out the schema for all the db's in our department, but it's in excess of 100 pages (10x10). How the hell is this guy supposed to make sense of any of that?

    Our other DBAs are working from home this week, so he has nobody that can really walk him through stuff.

    I wonder if he'll still be here next Monday?

     



  • @snoofle said:

    Our other DBAs are working from home this week,
     

    "Hey other DBA, can you come in today and have a chat with the new guy?"


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @snoofle said:

    We got approval to hire an additional DBA
     

    Snoofle, I'm disjointedness in you man. This is completely unacceptable. People on this forum have been literally BEGGING you to hire them, and you go with a stranger?

    Betrayal, man. Right to the heart. =(

     



  • @Lorne Kates said:

    People on this forum have been literally BEGGING you to hire them, and you go with a stranger?

    Remember snoofle is just a contractor and was describing how the hiring wasn't well organized by his client (thus the not knowing the guy was starting when he showed up), so the idea that he would have any influence to use is silly.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @snoofle said:

    We got approval to hire an additional DBA. Joy.

    We found a good one. Joy.

    He accepted the job. Joy.

    HR forgot to tell us his start date. Uh oh.

    It's Monday at 9:30 AM. He shows up raring to go. My boss had no idea he was starting this week. There is no phone, laptop, chair or desk. My boss tells him to get some coffee and go read the paper in the kitchen. For the rest of the week.

    Why didn't we put him in some desk that's empty for the day?

    a) We have more folks than desks, so we're on a permanent rotating schedule, and sharing desks. There are no empty desks

    b) Even if there was an empty desk, there are no extra laptops that he could borrow to look at a schema diagram. I printed out the schema for all the db's in our department, but it's in excess of 100 pages (10x10). How the hell is this guy supposed to make sense of any of that?

    Our other DBAs are working from home this week, so he has nobody that can really walk him through stuff.

    I wonder if he'll still be here next Monday?

     That happened to me once, only everyone knew when I started, but they didn't start processing the paperwork to get you a PC until after you showed up, so everyone--including $100 an hour contractors--didn't get a PC for two weeks on average.

     Oh, and because someone in the paperwork flow went on vacation a few days after I got there, I was delayed an extra week before I got my PC. Their solution?  Restart the entire flow of paperwork a week after I arrived, which was when they figured out my paperwork was stuck. (And just to top the absurdity, when the vacationer came back, she pushed on my original paperwork--and nobody stopped to look at it--so I got a second PC a week after my first. Unfortunately, the guy who delivered them wouldn't leave it.)



  • @snoofle said:

    I printed out the schema for all the db's in our department, but it's in excess of 100 pages (10x10). How the hell is this guy supposed to make sense of any of that?
     

    How many pages??? I hope that that is with types, triggers, views, foreign keys, constraints, packages, partitioning and whatever else your db has to offer. I had one db scheme that would have daily partitions, so that could account for a couple of pages, but 100...


  • @snoofle said:

    I printed out the schema for all the db's in our department
     

    <thread hijack>

    Are there any tools that you can point at an Oracle DB and let it generate a graphical representation of a schema?

    I understand SQL Serv + Visio does this, wondered if there was anything for Ellison's offspring.



  • @Cassidy said:

    I understand SQL Serv + Visio does this

    You don't need Visio; SQL Server Management Studio does it all by its lonesome.



  • I am still surprised how many heads or chief forget that they need to "ask" the it departement for new employees to get a desktop or a laptop. They all seems to think we have a big magic box where we can put our hands and get out with a brand new computer that fits exactly the needs of the newcomer. So they come with their new employee and say "hey i need a pc for this guy" and we say "hey, do you have a budget for this? Because we don't even have 500$ left to by him a crap box, and next budget is next year."



  • @locallunatic said:

    @Lorne Kates said:

    People on this forum have been literally BEGGING you to hire them, and you go with a stranger?

    Remember snoofle is just a contractor and was describing how the hiring wasn't well organized by his client (thus the not knowing the guy was starting when he showed up), so the idea that he would have any influence to use is silly.

    I have absolutely no say in who gets hired other than for the purpose of technical interviews.

    I've said before that they are making us hire developers we didn't ask for to sit at desks we don't have to do work we don't need help doing.



  • @TGV said:

    How many pages???
    120-ish pages in total.

    @Cassidy - tools: I just wrote a ksh script to scan all our DAO's, and those of our counterpart systems, then iterate over the table list and query Oracle for the columns, triggers and constraints, and dump it. I have a nice pdf of the schema; you can clearly see all the relationships, but I'm not pasting together over 100 pages by hand for him, and he has no place to lay it out to do it himself.

    By the end of the day, he seemed somehwat disenchanted.



  • For my very first job out of college, I interviewed on a Friday and was hired immediately. I was told to come in "tomorrow". So I showed up on Saturday. The boss showed up on Monday. Business language is not English language.



  • @Cassidy said:

    <thread hijack>

    *points gun at Cassidy* Thread marshal! Step away from that keyboard, put your hands behind your head and get down on the ground. NOW!


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Cassidy said:

    Are there any tools that you can point at an Oracle DB and let it generate a graphical representation of a schema?

    I generally use SchemaSpy. It generates a bunch of html that's handy for off-line browsing of the schema. I rarely look at the full graphical rendering due to the size of our schema, but the page for each table shows other tables (out to 1 or 2 keys away) in the same format.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    You don't need Visio; SQL Server Management Studio does it all by its lonesome.
     

    Aha, didn't know that - someone showed me a visio-style diagram so I just assumed.

    @snoofle said:

    @Cassidy - tools: I just wrote a ksh script
     

    Oh, okay. A roll-your-own. I was going to perl/php up something similar but thought I best establish what wheels existed before commencing a  redesign.

    @AndyCanfield said:

    I was told to come in "tomorrow". So I showed up on Saturday.

    You do realise this shows your inability to clarify specifications and determine exactly what is required, rather than what is being asked for?

    @boomzilla said:

    I generally use SchemaSpy.

    <predictable>"it relies on Java, therefore it's automatically shit"</dickweed> - let's get that out of the way to save some time and draw a line under it.

    Now... thanks for the link. I'm going to get a chance to play with it thurs or friday, so I'll give that a whirl and see how it goes, ta.

    @Anonymouse said:

    Thread marshal! Step away from that keyboard

    FUCK! BUSTED!


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Cassidy said:

    @boomzilla said:
    I generally use SchemaSpy.

    <predictable>"it relies on Java, therefore it's automatically shit"</dickweed> - let's get that out of the way to save some time and draw a line under it.

    It gets worse. It's meant to be run from the command line.



  • @boomzilla said:

    It gets worse. It's meant to be run from the command line.
     

    Maybe I'm a geek but I'm used to running command-line stuff quite frequently.

    Maybe I'll see all the different java switches, class paths and run-time parameters I need to type and then reconsider.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Cassidy said:

    @boomzilla said:
    <sarcasm>It gets worse. It's meant to be run from the command line.</sarcasm>

    Maybe I'm a geek but I'm used to running command-line stuff quite frequently.

    Maybe I'll see all the different java switches, class paths and run-time parameters I need to type and then reconsider.

    FTFM



  • @boomzilla said:

    It gets worse. It's meant to be run from the command line.

    At least that means no one will complain about its awful non-native widgets.


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