Thursday, March 30, 2006

 

When to leave? Is this a good or bad company?

During my recent change in job I started doing some reading about finding jobs, and identifying the types of jobs I was best suited for. I have continued to do some reading around this general topic of finding work, employment and the nature of companies today. I recently came across an article describing various signs to look out for, telling you it is time to get ready to leave your current job and employer. There are classic things in there about having a bad manager, and about being overworked but never getting the recognition for it.


It started me thinking about whether I could have spotted the failures with my previous employers, before they went too far downhill and I had to bail out. Which made me realise another sign of when it is time to get out before it is too late. I had been aware of this sign all the time, but always presumed it was not critical. However, with hindsight I now believe it is, and should not be ignored.


The sign can be termed: What would you do with this company in this position?


Put yourselves in the shoes of the top executives, whether the CEO, the head of design or development, head of sales, marketing or whatever. Given what you know about your company and the market it operates in, what do you personally believe is the best thing for it to do for
medium to long term success?


If you find yourself coming to a different conclusion than the senior executives in the company, then my advise is to find another job in another company as soon as possible. My experience is that the workers at the bottom, dealing with customers and suppliers (at the coalface as I like to think of it) do know how the company works and what is going on. They are far closer to the reality of the market and their customers than senior management are. And if you think the right direction for the good of the company is different to where the senior management are taking it, then it can only fail. And it is better to get out before it is too late, and either the company collapses or there is a significant restructuring and you get laid off.


I believe that this has applied to all 3 of my previous jobs:


As a kind of postscript to this, I am not unhappy about leaving Sun, only unhappy about ignoring the signs and not getting out sooner. As a result of this I have found a better job, which I find much more interesting and fulfilling than any of the stuff that I was doing at Sun. Really, when you see the signs that things are not right, whether it be bad company direction as in my examples, or working for a bad manager, or not getting recognition, or any other sign, it is really an opportunity to get out of that bad job and company and find a far better one. By delaying the point at which I left Sun, I was really missing out on an opportunity to look for a better job and take it when I found it. I was choosing to be blind to the impending crash, and when it happened I had to react quickly. But it was definitely the right thing to have happened.

 

Sun - Still Sinking

I see from recent announcements that senior managers and executives in Sun continue to leave the company. This reinforces my believe that Sun is suffering from both a lack of clear direction and future strategy, and that Scott McNealy is getting in the way of Sun doing the right things. If these were not true, why would senior managers continue to run from Sun as fast as they can, and in such numbers? Why not work to make it better, and reap the rewards as the company rebounds?



The head of software at Sun is going to Adbobe, leaving another hole to be filled at the top of Sun. And this news report also mentions the prior departure of the head of worldwide sales.



Don't forget that all of the original top executives that were there when Sun got to its peak during the dot-com boom before 2001 have all left. This includes people like Ed Zander, now running Motorola. Now we are seeing most of the second set of executives that Scott put into place leaving Sun. These were the people that Scott had confidence in to turn around Sun. Which of course has not happened. So Sun will be left with another change in the senior executives at the top, being the third set in 5 years.



Also it seems like most of the top executives from Storagetek have run as fast as they can from Sun, following its $4 billion purchase of Storagetek. Clearly these people have looked at the state of Sun today, and how it has handled the merger with the Storagetek organisation, and decided they are better off somewhere else. This is starting to look like another company Sun has paid a lot of money for, and is managing to drive out the original employees and in the process fail to capitalise on the products and technology they acquired. Anyone remember Cobalt, and Netscape, and Forte? The list continues to get longer.


The only positive bit of news about Sun is an upgrade in the target stock price from Morgan Stanley.
However, when you read the announcement closely, you realise that the analyst is actually agreeing with my general comments:


To quote the article: "expects the company will announce some sort of restructuring in the next six months", and also the analyst said: "We still don't have the confidence that organic growth will return on a sustainable basis."

Thursday, March 16, 2006

 

Sybase Monitoring Tables (1)

Sybase has introduced a set of monitoring tables with ASE 12.5.0.3 (aka. the MDA tables). As someone new to Sybase, I found these tables to be very similar to the V$ tables of Oracle. They both essentially provide a real time view onto in memory data structures using the relational database table metaphor, so that you can use SQL itself to query what the database is up to at a given point in time.


The first point is how similar these two features are conceptually. They both contain similar tables with similar sets of data:



There are of course differences between the two features, and I am not attempting to say that the Sybase one is equivalent to the Oracle one. It is just interesting to note that Oracle has had the V$ tables for many years, and Sybase has recently introduced a new feature that ends up seeming very similar in principle. Is this a case of convergent behaviour? Is a real time view onto in memory structures the ultimate way to go for performance monitoring?


Given that Sybase has recently introduced these, and that they seem similar to the V$ tables of Oracle, which Oracle has had for many years, it seems natural to try and use them to investigate what a system is doing. Here, of course, is where you come up against the differences between the two products and their approach to these features.


For instance, the Oracle V$SQL view contains all recently executed SQL statements, including a count for the number of executions and other statistics. The key point is that it still contains data on old, previously executed SQL statements. They remain accessible to V$SQL until their entry is reused for another SQL statement. However, the Sybase monProcessSQLStatement and monProcessSQLText views only contain currently executing SQL statements. Which is fine to a point, but does not let you see what anything was recently executing or how frequently.


However, using a snapshotting technique similar to that used in STATSPACK for Oracle, you can easily record the contents of these Sybase monitoring tables over an extended period of time, and then later analyse them to see what your system was up to.


Using this I have been able to investigate some slowly performing Sybase applications, and detect things like resource contention. The benefit of this approach is that you capture the data all the time, and analyse it at your leisure later. If you tried to use these monitoring tables directly, the danger is that by the time you spot a problem the situation has changed, and the data related to that problem is no longer visible in these real time tables.


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