What is on Your Mind?

Hello everyone,
I have been in the corporate world for a couple of years now, and I have realized that most successful/semi-productive people are those that are a hybrid between technically proficient in Visualbasic/Access while at the same time in the corporate sphere, meaning Powerpoints and "management". The management part aside, I would like to know, which tools, in your experience have been consistent in lending you a helping hand to set yourself apart from the rest of the average working crowd.

Example: we have a configuration management database (cmdb) which is in really bad shape, it is not very well maintained for various reasons. The management sphere knows this, and can complain about, but has no real measure. The technical sphere knows this as well, but is, well, too technical. The "hybrids" I talked about, they are in charge of an "improvement program" that has been setup by the management sphere. The average hybrid will create a couple of powerpoints, process documentation and muck around manually or with Excel with a cmdb export to see trends. The really efficient hybrid will do the stuff, but he will also use certain tools, in this example Visual Basic, to get some real numbers out of a cmdb export, to say: x percent of the data field "address" is empty, etc.

I am not too keen on learning Visual Basic, because I believe the Unix tools are a lot more powerful, thus I prefer to invest my time in Unix.

For those of you who can relate to my situation, do you agree, or should I just learn Visual Basic?

If you agree, what are the tools you recommend learning? Here's what I have thought about (in the order of importance):

- perl
- SQL
- awk
- php

Thanks for your ideas and insights!

Moderator's Comments:

Profanity removed. It is not necessary to use profanity to communicate an idea. This forum is open to all people of alll ages, even youngsters. Please follow forum rules.

This is a pretty microsoft related question for a unix forum. And I would call myself pretty successful and productive in my role without having ever layed my hands on VB and access But anyways ...

No matter what you use, I think it is always a question of how well do you know the tools you would need to support your technology - and if the technology suits to your business. You cannot support any technology without knowing how to support it. You for example cannot administer unix without knowing how to use the shell commands ...

We of course could tell you now learn any of the things you mentioned above - or all of them ... but we do not know anything about your role.

As a unix person, my first thought was: migrate to another DB like i.e. mysql or oracle or maybe domino ... and learn sql or whatever supporting technology you need to maintain it. If you are stuck with MS backoffice products than there will be no way around learning vb ... you cannot maintain a product properly that you do not know.

But ask yourself if it is worth the effort - or could another technology maybe support your business needs in a better way and adressing your performance issues would be a great opportunity to drive the change - and this could be a technology you already know?

And - knowing what you are doing will always set you positive apart from the crowd There are simply too many people out there that do not know what they are doing ...

Just my 2 cents
regards
zxmaus

You are asking two different questions: 1) what skills will I need to get ahead in the corporate world and 2) what tools will be most useful while doing so. Cant vouch for the first (there are different forums for that), but speaking for the second, you will probably benefit from knowing SQL throughout your career.