Category: Soft Skills

Social skills, people, communication, etc.

Scrabble Bully

How to Survive the Office Bully

Jeff MlakarLeave a comment
Featured image photo credit: TheDyslexicBook.com. Licensed: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Being a software person has advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side you probably “speak machine” with ease. However we often struggle to interface well with the other humans. One of the ills of the office that I have experienced is the office bully. Over the years I have compiled an effective strategy and tactics to deal with them.

The best resource I’ve read is a book called “Beating the Workplace Bully” by Lynne Curry (twitter). The book does an exemplary job of describing the situation and prescribing treatment for dealing with the workplace bully. I share the content below. Read on to see the details and my analysis!

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T-SQL Tuesday Logo

T-SQL Tuesday #93 – Interview get-help

Jeff Mlakar6 Comments

The topic of this months T-SQL Tuesday #93 (hosted by Kendra Little / @Kendra_Little) is Interviewing Patterns & Anti-Patterns. The question: What advice to you have for people preparing for or going through an interview?

It is a big question with many different perspectives and factors:

  • Entry level vs experienced professional
  • Startup vs enterprise
  • DBA vs developer

Instead of delving into each specific domain I will discuss some insights that have served me well. I hope they will help you too. Whether you are interviewing for a Senior DBA role or an entry level BI developer some things remain the same.

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Introvert Secret Skills

Introvert at Work – How to Survive and Be Successful as a Software Engineer

Jeff Mlakar7 Comments

Calling all introverts! This post is for you if:

  1. People drain your energy and you gain it back from being alone
  2. You sit at your desk with huge air traffic controller headphones on most of the day
  3. You took a personality test and it said you are an introvert

If you work with software, chances are you are an introvert. There are literally dozens of us! Yet we often wear our introversion as a Scarlet Letter instead of the champion belt that it is. Keep reading to find out how to use your introversion to your advantage at work.

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