Voice of the DBA

Author: Steve Jones

A series of episodes that look at databases and the world from a data professional's viewpoint. Written and recorded by Steve Jones, editor of SQLServerCentral and The Voice of the DBA.
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Where Your Value Separates You from Others
Episode 5
Thursday, 8 January, 2026

I ran across a post that discusses what makes you a senior engineer (via Brent Ozar). The main point of the post is that there is a core skill that separates senior engineers from others, which is reducing ambiguity. When a senior engineer gets an ill-defined (or ill-communicated) request, they can deliver a solid, or even great, result. When someone says "performance is poor," what do you do with that? Can you build a plan to identify the issues and solve them? Or do you expect the customer to explain what is slow and why it's slow? What metrics do they have showing things are slow? A senior engineer can ask questions to find the problem and then determine how to move forward. Read the rest of Where Your Value Separates You from Others