A while back, Kevin Conan (Blog | @ConanTheCDN) emailed me about this months #meme15 topic. He thought it would be good to have people think about their jobs a little and consider that the grass may be greener on this side of the fence. Which leads to this month’s question:
What are 5 reasons why you like your job?
With my job, I work as a consultant with Digineer. They are an IT and management consulting firm located in Minnesota. We have about fifteen people on our team of SQL Server consultants. I’m the group’s Enterprise Consultant; which means that along with consulting with clients, I also am tasked with providing technical lead for the group and interacting with the community.
Experiences
As a consultant, I get the chance to work with many clients and projects. With each opportunity, I learn a new perspective and approach that has been taken to building various data platforms. There have been a number of occasions where problems between clients are similar and this similarity allows me to bring those experiences to the next client.
Challenge
My clients don’t often bring me in for the small and easy stuff. For that, their staff usually has the capacity to handle their needs. The time to turn to consultants is when the timelines or technical depth of the project requires outside help. Because of this, I often find myself on engagements that are relatively challenging.
Mentoring
One of my goals after each engagement is to make sure that the DBAs and developers know a little bit more at the end of the engagement than they did at the start. Being a consultant provides an excellent opportunity to do this. While working on the projects, I will share the reasons behind decisions made while implementing the project. This has led to a few clients who continue to have me stop in a few hours a month to talk about where the team is at and provide guidance on moving the environment forward and growing their skills.
Freedom
One bonus of working at Digineer has been the ability to exercise a lot of freedom in choosing where to move my career. As my skills and interests have changed through the years, so too have my responsibilities and assignments. I owe in large part the work I’ve done in the SQL Server community to the freedom that I have. I am able to participate in presentations, webcast, conferences, and blogs as part of my day to day job.
Stability
The last one in the list is stability. I’ve been at the same company going on seven years now. When the economy went south, I didn’t have to worry too much about it’s effect on my job. Sure, I had to make sure that I continued to deliver for clients. But if the project was cancelled, it wasn’t the end of my paycheck. When my engagements end, I don’t have to hunt for where I’ll be engaged at next. And, when I want to take a vacation, it’s baked into my job already. A lot of the risk of being a consultant, or an independent consultant, ends up not affecting my job, which I appreciate.
Those are my five reasons for liking my job. Think about why you like your job and leave a comment on this post to share with others. Stay tuned tomorrow for the roundup of the other #meme15 posts.
Follow me on Twitter at StrateSQL.
Original article: Why I Like My Job – #Meme15
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