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Where’s Mike?

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March 8, 2017 by Mike Hillwig

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to do more blogging. It’s early March, so I guess I should get started.

My friend Andy pointed out last week that I hadn’t blogged in more than a year. I’m ashamed to admit that he’s right. Sometimes life gets in the way of life itself. For me, my career took a sharp left turn last April.

From May to September 2016, I spent almost every week in Pittsburgh hiring and on-boarding my new team of six SQL Server DBAs and helping do the same with six Oracle DBAs. The number of people working for me tripled in the course of two months. This summer left me both physically and emotionally exhausted. At the same time, I learned a ton.

Somewhere along the way, our lone SQL Server DBA in Wellesley (Boston suburbs) office left the company, so I had to hire a replacement.

Over the previous five years, I got to know my company’s infrastructure really well… or so I had thought. When you start to teach this to 13 new employees, you get questions you’ve never thought of. It was another case of learning by teaching others.

This summer showed me some tremendous successes, but it also led to some setbacks and failures. I hope to take a few blog posts over the next few weeks to share what I learned, how I succeeded, and how I failed. Technology leadership is a whole new field for me. Adulting when you can’t live in your own house takes that to a new level.


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