Meidinger’s law

To celebrate the 100th TSQL Tuesday, this month’s

Maybe a bit

And what about

We are all imposters

If you are going to change jobs every two years, then that’s how long you have to learn before it’s on to the next thing.

I’ve had my freakout about the data platform constantly broadening. Mindy Curnutt has a great podcast episode about imposter syndrome. We are all worried about the pace of change.

And I think Meidinger’s law is our saving grace in some sort of way. Things keep changing, we have to keep learning. But how much we actually have to learn is constrained by that 22 year old drinking red-bull with no family obligations.

Throwing Darts

Oh yeah, we were supposed to be predicting the future. Well I think the fact that we are all going to be replaced by that 22 year old some day gives us a hint at the future.

I think more and more things are going to be abstracted away. We’ve seen it with virtualization. We’ve seen it with the cloud. These abstractions mean the new guy can learn new, more important things. He doesn’t have to be intimately familiar with RAID 5. He doesn’t have to have the OSI model memorized.

I think we are seeing it now with data science and machine learning. So much of those areas require a Phd and years and years of study. But things like Azure machine learning and Azure cognitive services are going to get easier and easier. So easy that even the new guy can do it.

For the 99th T-SQL Tuesday, I’m going to talk about something I do that’s completely unrelated to work. Something I’ve never told any of you about.

What I don’t want you to know

There are 3 things in my life that could cost me a job, things that I fear an employer ever finding out about. I suffer from 3 big problems in life: depression, diabetes, and LARP. That’s right, I’m… a LARPer.

I’m not kidding about the fear.  People get weirded out easily, and it’s easier to say no to an applicant than to say yes. I really worry about someone finding this post and turning me down.

I once heard a story about a potential staffed employee. Everything was looking good until the client looked up the employee’s Facebook and found out that they were a furry. After that point, the client was no longer interested in staffing that employee.

It’s unfortunate that harmless personal hobbies present such a risk, but here we are.

How it started

When I first heard about it, I was skeptical. In my head, all I knew was the stereotype of the uber-nerd shouting MAGIC MISSILE!

My then fiancée and a couple friends of ours had started going, and she wanted me to come along. I told her quite clearly, “Listen, LARP is so dorky that if I go with YOU, you’ll end up breaking up with ME. No way.”

Well it turned out that my excuse had a limited shelf-life. A couple days after we are married, my new wife reminds me that I’m very much against us getting divorced. So now I have no excuse not to go, because we aren’t breaking up any time soon. We go to LARP a week after we are married.

What is it?

I could tell you it’s Dungeons and Dragons in the woods, but that would be doing it a disservice. Instead, let me tell you a couple stories from Memorial Day weekend, 2016. It was 8 months later, and the start of our honeymoon.

That time I tried to commandeer a flying ship

So my character is a diplomat / minstrel / healer. Which means, if possible, I’d prefer to solve things with words instead of violence. And one of my abilities is to use my charisma to persuade people, convince them we are friends, etc.

So, me and my group are informed by a Non-Player Character that some bandits have taken over his grounded airship, and he needs us to get it back.

We approach the ship, and as we get on the ramp the bandits warn us to stay back. I tell my group, “Let me handle this.”

So I walk up the ramp, alone and in mild danger.
I tell the bandits, “Hey, I’m here to help. That guy you stole this ship from, he’s trying to find adventurers to kill you.”
“We didn’t steal it!”, they reply.
“Fine, the former owner is looking for you.”, I say as I keep walking up the ramp.
”Stay back!” they shout. Then I throw two spell packets at them. Spell packets are basically birdseed wrapped in cloth. This allows for ranged attacks without hurting us or the wild life.

Now the two bandits at the front are charmed and best friends with me. They are trying to convince the rest of the bandits that I’m legit. That they know me from…somewhere?

“Now, here’s how I’m going to help you.” I say as I lean forward, at the top of the ramp. As my foot hits the ground, I hear a loud squeak.

Crap.

“Hoooooold!”, we shout. We have to pause the game because something important just happened. I stepped on a trap. An obvious trap. A trap so obvious that the person setting them up expected everyone to see it. Nope, not me. I’m too busy with my silver tongue.

“10 fire damage in a 10 foot radius. That counts as an aggressive action and breaks charisma.”

Crap. I guess we aren’t BFFs anymore.

I try to re-charisma the one bandit and convince her that she set off the trap. She apologizes profusely, but the rest of the bandits are not convinced and a melee ensues.

Well, at least I tried. Now we have to kill them all. This is what happens when you travel with murderhobos.

Thankfully, all of the dead bandits are very forgiving.

That time my hat was a cauldron, and it saved the swamp

“Keshan, do you know how to featherfall?” I’m asked.
“Sure, I just learned it.” I reply.
“Okay, we need you to climb this tree [metaphorically] with these magic flowers, and then jump out of the tree.”, Angus says.
“No problem.”

I jump and do a twirl and pretend I’m falling out of a tree. Now they can make some magic potion that’s going to cure the swamp of some ancient curse.

Only there is  a problem. “Where is the cauldron?” says the game marshal, “You can’t make a potion without a cauldron.”

Mind you, we are preparing for a town fight, a battle between all of the players and all of the NPCs. As far as our characters are concerned, we could be attacked at any moment.

So I shout, “There’s no time! Zanrick, turn my hat into a cauldron.” Zanrick here is a gnome, and they are a crafty folk. And they have an ability called improvise, which means they can make something into something else if they B.S. well enough.

More shouts go out, “We need an amour patch!”. We end up with 3 of them. Technically they are mason jar lids, but in game they are used to repair your armor after a fight. And suddenly, my hat is a cauldron brewing a magic potion to save the swamp. Pretty cool, right?

The best part of all of it? The game marshal was so delighted by my silliness, that my hat now counts as plate armor in-game. She was just expecting one of us to go to the kitchen and grab a pot. Well, that simply wouldn’t do.

To hell with what everyone thinks

There was a recent conversation on Twitter about how when you are 40, you learn to worry less about what other people think, and you learn to do what you love. I’m not quite 30, and I worry what people will think of me, but damnit I love LARP.

I mentioned depression at the beginning of this post. I usually don’t like to talk about it, because I don’t want to seem like I’m fishing for sympathy. But it’s worth mentioning that one of the causes of depression is ruminating or obsessing over negative thoughts.

In my life there have been only 4 things that have truly gotten me out of my own head and allowed me to stop worrying about things:

1. Video game programming competitions
2. Board games
3. First-person shooters
4. LARP

That’s it. Those are the only things that allow me to escape for a little while.

But even more than that, LARP is an excuse to turn off my cell phone. It’s an excuse to go outside and walk around. It’s a situation where I’m forced to be hyper-social and meet new friends. It’s this beautiful mathematical dual to everything I do in IT.

I do it to get away. I do it get a break. I do it to make friends.

As I get older, all of those things get harder and harder to do. I may take my work home with me, but there’s at least one place in this world where my work can’t follow me.

One last thing

One last thing, that I should probably mention. So, I might have published a book, in-game. Because why the hell not.

I’m planning on building a salary calculator based on the data from played around with some of the numbers earlier. This time I’m planning on going a lot deeper.

I want your help and feedback! I want to know what would make a calculator most useful to you. Feel free to poke holes in my methodology and tell me how a real data scientist would handle this project.

In this post, I’m going to outline some initial findings as well how I’m planning to approach this project. All of the information below is based on a narrow subset:

• USA, full postal code
• DBA job
• Between $15,000 and $165,000

Regarding zip codes, some people only entered a portion of their zip for privacy sake. In the final analysis, I plan on taking into account the ~200 US individuals who did that.

Initial findings

The data isn’t very predictive

So I’m using something called a multiple linear regression to make a formula to predict your salary based on specific variables. Unfortunately, the highest Coefficient of Determination (or R²) I’ve been able to get is 0.37. Which means, as far as I understand it, that at most the model explains 37% of the variation.

Additionally the spread on the results isn’t great either. The standard deviation, a measure of spread, is about $25,000 on the original subset of data. Which means we’d expect 68% to be within +/- $25,000 of the average and 95% to be within +/- $50,000 of the average. So what happens when we apply our model?

When we apply the model we get something called residuals, which are basically the difference between what we predicted and what the actual salary was. The standard deviation on those residuals is $20,000. Which means that our confidence range is going to be +/- 20-40k. That to me doesn’t seem like a great range.

There are a few strong indicators

Let’s take a look at what we get when we do a multiple regression with the Excel Analysis ToolPak addin:

The two biggest factors by far seem to be how long you’ve worked and and where you live. In fact, we can explain 30% of the variance using those two variables:

The two other variables that are very strong are whether you telecommute and whether you are independent. When we add those, our adjusted R² goes up to 33%.

Then after that we have a handful of variables that have a less than 5% chance of being erroneous:

• Gender. It’s still a bit early to jump to conclusions, but it looks like being female might cost you $6,000 per year. This is after controlling for years of experience, education, hours worked, and if this is your first job. Gender could still be tied to other factors like a gap in your career or if you negotiate pay raises.
• First Job. “First job” I identified as having identical values for years of experience and years in this job. If you haven’t changed jobs, it could be costing you $4,000, which lines up with my personal experience.
• Hours worked per week. This is basically what you would expect.
• Education. This is the number of years of education you received outside of high school.
• Build Scripts and automation. One of the tasks people could check was if they are automating their work. Out of all the tasks people could list, this seems to have the biggest impact.

There are some interesting correlations

Part of doing a multiple regression is making sure your variables aren’t too strongly correlated or “collinear”. As part of this, is possible to find some interesting correlations.

• If you are on-call, you are less likely to have post-secondary education. You are also probably overworked and learning PowerShell (no surprise there).
• Certifications correlate negatively with being a dev-dba instead of a production dba.
• If this is your first job, you are less likely to be working more than 40 hours per week. Maybe that $4,000 paycut is worth it
• Independents also work less hours per week. So maybe your second job should be going independent.
• If you telecommute, you might make $2,000 more per year for every day of the week you telecommute; but you are going to be working more hours as well.

Plans moving forward

So here is the current outline for this blog series:

1. Identifying features (variables)
2. Data cleanup
3. Extracting features
4. Removing collinear features
5. Performing multiple regression
6. Coding a calculator in Javascript
7. Reimplementing everything in R

So let me know what you think. I plan on making all of the data and code freely available on github.

This week’s T-SQL Tuesday is about a time that you solved a difficult technical problem. Unfortunately my brain doesn’t store events that way, so I can’t think of any good stories. Instead, I want to talk briefly about how games have made me a better programmer and a better troubleshooter.

Map-making in TFC

The first game I want to talk about is Team Fortress Classic. It’s a team based shooter from the late 90’s. I used to play this game all the time. But I did even more than that, I would make custom levels to play on with other people.

Mapmaking for TFC, was generally a simple process. You would create simple polyhedrons and then apply textures/patterns to them. Then you would place non-terrain objects, called entities, inside of your terrain. Everything is pretty straightforward…until you get a leak.

A leak is when the outside of the level is accessible to the inside of the level. Imagine you are building a spaceship or a submarine, if you have a leak it just won’t work. The challenge is that the level editor won’t tell you where you have a leak¹. So how do you solve it?

In my case, you encase half the level in solid rock, so to speak. I would just make a big cube and cover up half of the level. If the level compiled, I knew my leak was somewhere in that half. Then I just kept repeating with smaller and smaller cubes.

I do the same thing all the time in my professional life. I’ll comment whole swathes of code. I’ll jump to half-way to the data pipeline to see where the error starts. TFC taught me to keep cutting the problem in half until I find it.

Guessing the secrets of the universe with Zendo

Undoubtedly proof that I was destined to be a programmer, one of my favorite board games ever is Zendo. It was actually one of my nicknames in college. It’s got a silly theme about discerning if something has the Buddha nature. In reality, it boils down to one player making up a rule, and everyone else trying to determine what the rule is.

If it sounds easy, I dare you to play something similar over at the New York Times. Chances are you are going to get it wrong.

The biggest thing Zendo taught me, was fighting against confirmation bias. It taught me to ask “What would prove my theory wrong”. Good troubleshooting involves guessing a cause, determining a test that will give you new information, and then running that test.

That test might be running a simpler version of a query that’s failing. It might mean adding a breakpoint to your code and inspecting variables.

Learning how to think systematically about this sort of thing has been tremendously useful.

Learning outside of programming

Troubleshooting is very often a set of skills and approaches that don’t need to do anything with technology per-se. I think looking at how we can get these skills in other places, like games can be very useful.

Speaking of other sources, there are two book I can recommend wholeheartedly. The first is How to Solve It which is about how to solve mathematical problems, but it provide a number of ways to break down a problem or approach it from different angles. The second is called Conceptual Blockbusting. It focuses on the nebulous issue of how we think about problem solving. It’s very much a book about thinking and I definitely enjoyed it.

Footnotes

¹ Only after writing this blog post did I find an article explaining out to get the level editor to tell you exactly were the leak is. Sigh.