{"id":216,"date":"2009-02-22T23:13:21","date_gmt":"2009-02-22T21:13:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/?p=216"},"modified":"2015-08-03T20:12:10","modified_gmt":"2015-08-03T18:12:10","slug":"things-you-know-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/2009\/02\/22\/things-you-know-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Things you know now"},"content":{"rendered":"

Grant (again) tagged me<\/a> on another of these blog memes, this time started by Mike Walsh<\/a>. What do I know now that I didn’t know when I started out. I’m very late on answering it, I blame that on a business trip, a pile of work I still haven’t found the bottom of, and a complete lack of enthusiasm to do anything constructive.<\/p>\n

1) “I don’t know” is not a sign of weakness<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I started in IT, I knew everything (at least I thought I did). Furthermore I thought I had to know everything. That lead to a number of problems, from ignoring offers for help, to tackling things beyond my abilities, right up to embarrassing myself in front of management after it became apparent I didn’t really know what I was talking about.<\/p>\n

2) Beware of self-proclaimed experts<\/strong><\/p>\n

Early on I worked with a database guru. At least, he said he was. Looking back now, older and (perhaps) wiser, many of his ‘best practices’ were nothing of the sort.<\/p>\n

Anyone can go around claiming to be an expert. The thing is to see what other people say about them<\/p>\n

3) Setbacks are not disasters<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was retrenched from the first company I worked for when they hit financial difficulties. I spent 6 months struggling to make ends meet. At the time I thought it was the worst thing possible. However it lead to a job that changed my focus to databases, leading to where I am now.<\/p>\n

It also taught me what some of my major weaknesses are – administration (finding work, chasing payments, etc)<\/p>\n

4) Usergroups are not a waste of time<\/strong><\/p>\n

I thought that when I started out (see point 1). Now I run one. Go figure<\/p>\n

I think just about everyone’s answered this already, so no tags.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Grant (again) tagged me on another of these blog memes, this time started by Mike Walsh. What do I know now that I didn’t know when I started out. I’m very late on answering it, I blame that on a… (Read more)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7h6n-3u","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=216"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1568,"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216\/revisions\/1568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sqlinthewild.co.za\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}