Not Everyone is an Expert Like You Are
I don’t know if you’ve had the pleasure recently of setting up a system for a friend who is completely non-technical. While we’ve come a long way in the setup (I mean, seriously, Windows starts with "Hi."), there are still so many things that just aren’t clear like they should be. Heck, there are some things you’ll just not be using without help from someone who understands at list a bit more about computers.
In this day and age (I’m aging myself, but bear with me), I’d have thought that this would be solved, or on the way to being solved. Nope.
The things that are good are really good. Windows sees networks very well by and large. Sometimes it sees printers. Sometimes it can determine correct drivers for existing printers. But in cases where it’s baffled? Good luck. Sure you and I know to head to the manufacturer’s site, grab the drivers (for the closest OS version) and install them, then work through the 5,000 dialogs and prompts to install other junk and get the driver going. Why a printer driver requires 80M of space, I’ll never understand, but I digress.
My point here is that we forget what we’ve learned to this point. We also take for granted that other people have learned the same things… about their data systems. Think about it. Your SQL Server runs really well, overall, these days. You apply patches without much (much!) concern about whether it will harm your system. You also know how to roll-back patches, you know how to troubleshoot. You also probably know how to design around issues and figure out things that work better than others. Great!
But if you assume others are in the same boat, I think you could be surprised and not in a good way. If you assume someone else is covering database design to take advantage of resources, indexing, relational options and the like, you may be surprised to find out they simply click on tables, create a new one and don’t think twice about it. They may not havehad the experience you’ve had in setting up things that work better in SQL Server with pieces in place. They may not have the experience of limiting access to information to provide for additional security.
There is so much we’ve collectively done. Don’t kid yourself, it’s a technical aptitude test every time you set up new databases on SQL Server, whether it’s on-premise, in the cloud, on Azure, on AWS, etc. it all adds up and it matters. Taking this full-circle to the initial thoughts about helping people that are non-technical… I’m not suggesting others are non-technical that you’re working with. But they may be differently experienced. This isn’t a PC way of saying "clueless" – it’s a way of saying that they have different things to fall back on and consider and different things that they’ve done in their own past.
Make sure you’re contributing. Make sure others have the benefit of your thoughts, your experiences. It’s amazingly important and it also keeps you on your toes. Do not assume they know what you know. It’s nearly impossible for that to be the case.
Have you seen cases where your experience and applying it to a project had a surprising impact? Perhaps cases where you THOUGHT others knew about certain elements only to be surprised?
Drop a comment below, let us know!