sql

Through most of my career, I believed that at some point I would be able to learn enough and master my profession to such an extent that I would be able to prescribe and guide my clients both internal (if I was a full-time employee) or external (if I was a consultant) to make correct technical decisions. I viewed the challenge to be merely technical and I thought that the better I knew my material, the more compellingly I could articulate the case to affect the correct technical decisions.

It was only after I was awarded my first MVP in 2006 that I became aware of the fact that (sadly) politics often trumps technology regardless of one's ability to persuade, research, and reliably inform.

Did you ever think to yourself when having a difficult time persuading a team "if only I had Hilary Cotter here, then I could convince them of this replication problem" or "if only Jimmy May were in this conversation, surely they would see the advantages of partition alignment"? Well, I don't want to discourage you, but I have been able to say both of those things and to my stunned disbelief the teams were unpersuaded. I was left with the incredulous reflection "if they won't listen to Hilary Cotter on replication - who WILL they listen to?" and "if they aren't persuaded by Jimmy May on partition alignment - how CAN they be persuaded"?

I don't have any answers today.

I am pondering what a friend (a WELL known name in SQL) described as IT "malpractice". It exists. There are people, teams, and companies that KNOWINGLY allow best practices to be trumped by politics and as IT practitioners there's nothing we can do about it.

So what is the response?

Quit?

Say: "waiter! check, please?" and go work for that mythical company that always does the right thing technically?

Who is that? Google? Apple?

I don't know.

What do you think?