The younger generation in the SQL community

John Sterrett asks us where the next generation is. Well, not quite. He asks us what we’re doing, or could be, to encourage younger people to get involved in the SQL community while increasing the number of younger speakers.

I’ll come back to the ‘what I’m doing’ question. First let’s talk about the age-demographic of people in the SQL community.

Yeah – there is definitely a lack of young people. But I think this has always been the case. Even when I got into SQL properly, this was after I’d spent about seven years as a consultant / programmer. Databases had always been part of what I did, but I didn’t consider myself a specialist until later. Even the first presentations I did in the technical community were about coding, not about SQL.

My story wasn’t unique, either. Other people I met in the SQL world had taken a while to realise the significance of data, even though their journeys were sometimes different. Some came to databases after spending time as a sysadmin, some came from business applications like Excel, and some had been programmers like I had. Few seemed to get into data right away, and at 30 I was still seen as fairly young for the data community. When I was first awarded MVP status (when I was 31) there were just four other SQL MVPs in Australia – all older than me.

These days, data is understood much earlier. Data science and analytics have become legitimate university courses in their own right! Back in my day, data was a single uni subject. SQL varieties don’t quite get the same appreciation as other platforms, but data itself is more popular than ever.

The community though… well, it’s like Fight Club. People don’t always talk about community like they could. They might attend meetings to learn, but the benefit of time spent with other professionals can take a while to click – especially in a post-pandemic world where people are used to doing their learning online.

Community seems to be lacking in a lot of parts of society – certainly here in Australia where there were significant periods of lockdown (much worse in Melbourne than Adelaide where I am). People still need people, but losing loved ones to contagious diseases has meant people just don’t choose to be around other people so much. Online groups are good, but people can watch in isolation.

Getting to the other side of the room – moving from being in an audience to presenting – that’s even harder for people today. If they’re not even in the room much, even having the conversation about presenting is tricky. What am I doing to change this? Well, I still mentor various people, and some of that is about presenting, but more of it is about getting established as experts – helping them learn what they want to learn, and encouraging them to take steps to go where they want to.

In my mentoring, I encourage people those who don’t know about data to learn about data. I encourage people who know about data to attend community events. And I encourage people who are attending to start thinking about what they can present about and then to take the step to do it. Because presenting on a topic is a great way to make sure you really know your stuff.

Presenting can be part of someone’s journey, but it can also take time to warm up to the idea. Whenever you step onto a stage you become very visible, and that can be daunting. But I also think that if someone is feeling comfortable in their own skin as an expert, knowing that they are legitimately good at what they do (often takes quite a bit of mentoring and encouragement), then they will often start to realise that they belong on the other side of the room.

I hope that my user group will be able to have a local first-time presenter later this year – and ideally, it’ll be someone under 30. I have some ideas about who that might be, but I know the timing has to be right for them, so I’m not setting it as an actual goal.

I’m definitely interested to see what other people are doing to encourage younger presenters – but I think when you look at the wider data community, not just SQL, things aren’t as grey as they might seem.

@robfarley.com@bluesky (previously @rob_farley@twitter)