Up Late

So, here I am. It's a little past 1:30 in the morning, and I'm up working - well, actually, right now I'm blogging - but the reason I'm up is that I'm working. Thankfully, I only have nights like these on a rare occasion, but I still don't generally foster any love for them. One of the great curses of being a database administrator is that prime time for making database changes is after-hours, when activity on the system is low.

Most of my efforts as a DBA have been geared towards finding ways to minimize late night work, and they've largely been effective, but late-night work is not entirely escapable. I'm grateful I can work from home, though. I'm sitting on the bedroom floor, typing this on a laptop, so I can be very grateful for that. With my new management role at work, I'd hoped to start to escape more of the mundane drudgery of database administration, and I guess I have to some degree, but it still takes up more of my time than I'd like. I'd like to be able to focus more of my time on improving the quality of my department and looking towards the future. Ironically, my company frequently has meetings where they tout the role of a leader as one who looks towards the future. In the past two days I've attended two meetings where videos extolled the virtues of dedicating time to look towards the future and concentrating our efforts in that endeavor. Yet, as I look at my situation, I find that there is little time to do it; we're constantly being given new tasks, and a chunk of them are tasks that require my particular knowledge and expertise. It's a vicious cycle, since in order to endow my team members with the knowledge and skills they need to do these tasks in my place, I need time - the very time that is being occupied by having to fulfill the tasks myself.

In all honesty, though, the problem is partly of my own making. When I do have time, I like to spend it doing the things that are interesting to me, and the fact is that most of my job is not interesting to me; what is interesting to me is generally programming, so I try to find programming projects here and there for myself, and I end up spending what "free" time I have on those. So, as I said, the problem is partly of my own making.

I suppose that at sometime in my past, I found database administration more interesting than I do now. I've never liked the late night aspect of it, but I've found other aspects of it interesting in the past. Generally, though, I've become disenchanted with the whole thing. I've invested a great deal of time and effort into educating myself on database theory and practice, and I've exhausted most of the interesting subject matter - at least that which pertains specifically to my roll in the field. There remain several esoteric topics that I could delve into more, but as I find the field generally uninteresting, I lack the motivation to explore other aspects of the field. This is not to say that I can answer every question that is put to me about databases or SQL Server (the particular database management system with which I work), but what questions I can't answer immediately, I generally can answer with a bit of research or a quick look in a book, and knowing that, I feel little need to proactively accumulate and store that knowledge - I prefer to use my brain cells for other things, I guess. So, this last paragraph all boils down to this: I really don't find what I do all that interesting anymore.

So, what am I to do about it? Unfortunately, it seems that there is little that I can do about it without incurring financial discomfort and risk. In my youth, I wasted a lot of opportunities to get a good education, and with three little ones at home and a full-time job, I haven't got the time to devote to an education now. That limits my ability to jump into a new career field. Not to mention that such a jump would almost certainly involve a decrease in salary. I end up feeling stuck with where I'm at and hoping that I can find ways to expand my horizons in my current company. In fact, I tried doing that a few months ago, when our company decided to dramatically alter their programming environment. I have quite a bit of experience in the new programming environment, so I let my managers know that I was interested in moving into programming. They thought about it a bit and returned with a very hefty project and a 3-month deadline to provide it, by myself. Essentially, I was given something that was beyond my capacity. I gave it a good start, but as I gathered requirements for the project it became increasingly clear that it was a substantial undertaking beyond my capabilities to achieve. Not to mention that I got promoted, and with my new duties I knew that I would have even less time to program, so I relinquished the project (to this day, nobody's working on it).

What am I to do? That is the question. For the time being, it seems like I just have to tick along and do what I can here and there, in the hope that someday I can make my move, escape from the dreary dregs of databases into something I find more interesting.