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Becoming DBA Kevlar: Roadblocks, Perfectionism, and Technical Orienteering with Kellyn Gorman (1/3)

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What if your strategy at work was to take on the problems no one else will? For Kellyn Gorman, this is a strategy that suits the way she works and learns best. Kellyn is a multi-platform database professional with 25 years of experience in our industry, and she’s also known as DBAKevlar.

This week in episode 320 you’ll hear what it was like to grow up in a perfectionist home as a child with autism and ADHD, the health challenge that forced Kellyn to start over professionally after losing 9 years of memories, and how she went from working at a shoe store to becoming a database administrator. We talk through ways to mitigate perfectionist tendencies by accepting work quality that’s good enough, being kind to yourself, and time calibration.

Original Recording Date: 02-21-2025

Topics – Meet Kellyn Gorman, A Perfectionist Environment, Hitting a Roadblock, Pursuing Unexplored Areas to Remove Barriers, Reaching Good Enough by Tuning for Time, Strengths and Weaknesses in Neurodiversity, No Fear in Asking for Help or Giving Help to Others

2:17 – Meet Kellyn Gorman

  • Kellyn Gorman is a database professional who has worked in the technology space for 25 years. Kellyn’s focus has been heavily on Oracle, but she also has experience with SQL Server, MySQL, Sybase, PostgreSQL, and much more. To sum it up, Kellyn excels in multi-platform database administration.
    • Should we have written our questions for this episode as database queries?

3:25 – A Perfectionist Environment

  • Kellyn is the oldest of 3 children and has perfectionist parents.
  • Kellyn is autistic and has ADHD. This is often called AuDHD. See Kellyn’s blog post on the strengths of ADHD/AuDHD.
    • Listen to some of the challenges from Kellyn’s childhood.
    • “So, this perfectionism was always placed upon me to do so much more because I was an intelligent child. But you would get me into most school environments that have a lot of structure…and my brain was like 25 McDonald’s drive-throughs all taking orders at the same time…. And that can perpetuate this idea that you are really failure instead of innovative and kind of doing things very differently than what is that structured expectation of what is fitting inside the box. I did not fit inside the box.” – Kellyn Gorman
    • Kellyn started to get the feeling of not living up to expectations.
    • Kellyn speaks to having an extreme awareness and being able to recognize patterns. She saw the need to structure her own box, which made a huge difference in what being a perfectionist meant.
    • At around age 15, Kellyn told her parents she planned to move far away (and she eventually did to escape what was expected of her).
    • Kellyn’s mother had specific plans and ideas for what success looked like for Kellyn as well as her younger sister.
    • “You comprehend that idea of what your parents may have and their ideas for you and what they think is successful is very different than what you might have decided. By the time I hit about 21 / 22, I was on my own idea and learning how to be good to myself, learning how to do things differently.” – Kellyn Gorman, on the mismatch between her parents’ definition of success and her own definition of it

7:32 – Hitting a Roadblock

  • “I ended up coming to I guess you’d say a complete roadblock in life because that perfectionism was constantly weighing on me even though I was very aware that it wasn’t the right thing for me. I ended up having a medical crisis where I ended up having 5 strokes between 21 and 26. I had to re-learn how to do everything…. I lost nine years of memories. I lost 50% of my visual field. I had to re-learn how to balance a checkbook, how to drive…it was huge.” – Kellyn Gorman
    • Kellyn mentioned she was lucky to have so many others around her for support during this time.
  • Circuit City opened up in Kellyn’s town, and they were looking for people to work in the computer department.
    • Two of the guys working with Kellyn at a shoe store suggested Circuit City hire her. They had nicknamed Kellyn “Kevlar” because they thought she was bullet proof.
    • At the time Circuit City hired her, Kellyn had never worked on a computer (zero experience). She still had a small speech impediment from her strokes then but performed well even on her first day in the role.
    • “And that was my journey into tech. They found out I had a knack for software. I had learned how to fix computers. As my brain healed, this was all coming about.” – Kellyn Gorman
  • Kellyn’s husband was doing desktop support at the time and suggested she give it a try as a next step and kept progressing from there.
  • “What you find out is that a lot of people talk about what they’re going to do. Not many people do…. I remember working in the shoe store and not being able to arrange shoes in size order…. It took me 3 days to do that when I first started. When you come from that place, everything else seems easier. You’re not so overcome by the idea of perfectionism…. It’s just it’s a new challenge and you’re going to take it on, and you’re not scared…you just do. And so, I would take on the things that nobody else would touch.” – Kellyn Gorman
  • Kellyn worked with 14 other people (all men), all of which wanted nothing to do with database software like Sybase or Oracle. Kellyn figured out how to do it.
  • Kellyn tells the story of people from Oracle wanting to know how she was running more than one 16-bit Oracle application on a Windows 95 computer. Those folks later told the company CIO that he needed to make Kellyn a DBA (database administrator) and encouraged sending her to certification training.
  • Kellyn’s first official DBA role was at Duke Energy. She inherited a massive SQL Server cluster that no one else wanted to touch and had no experience working with it at the time. Kellyn had to learn about it without Microsoft’s help, but she figured it out.
  • “So, I just kept doing that wherever I went because I found that people remembered your successes. They didn’t remember your failures…. The whole idea that you were Kevlar or you were bullet proof or that you were perfect had more to do with that you were doing and just did one more time past the failure…fall down 7 times, get up 8 kind of thing…. You could fail all you want as long as you were trying.” – Kellyn Gorman

12:04 – Pursuing Unexplored Areas to Remove Barriers

  • Did Kellyn’s learning process as she recovered become something she learned to apply to anything?
    • Kellyn thinks yes and says she was no longer afraid.
    • What we see on television about amnesia is not like what it really is. Kellyn remembers her brain “unfogging” around 5 months after her last stroke. Doctors realized after extensive testing she was missing 9 years of memories.
    • All of Kellyn’s adult memories, including her college education, were gone. She could not perform her duties as an accountant and needed to start completely over.
    • “My mindset was this is where we’re at. Wipe off the dirt. Pick yourself up. Start moving…. I just stopped being afraid of falling on my face because I was already down there.” – Kellyn Gorman
    • Kellyn has never been afraid of making progress in a new area little by little as a result of everything that happened. She’s never been afraid of taking on difficult tasks (which might be an ADHD thing).
    • “I think that I figured out what was the trick of me getting from the starting line to the finish line and continued to kind of build on that and doing that every time when I was going somewhere and perfecting it…. It’s served me very well.” – Kellyn Gorman
    • This reminds John of a pattern he’s seen in his own life and in the lives of others called Smart Kid Syndrome. When people start to say you’re talented in certain areas, one might get focused on being perceived as being really good at certain things and shy away from things that are difficult or that are new. Because of Kellyn’s situation and the loss of memories, she didn’t have any choice but to take a beginner’s mindset and a growth mindset.
    • “You don’t miss what you don’t remember…. And it may be a little bit ADHD again in me that they joke about out of sight, out of mind with us. For me, it’s very much like that. I don’t remember those 9 years, so I don’t really miss them.” – Kellyn Gorman
    • Kellyn says she has some memories of memories and reinforces that amnesia is not the way it is portrayed on television. Listen to her describe what it was like.
    • Part of what motivated Kellyn to pursue the areas others didn’t want to touch was that it allowed her to learn things in her own way without any barriers. Kellyn sees herself doing this even today for 2 reasons:
      • When other people know a great deal already, Kellyn doesn’t feel she can contribute as much.
      • In these areas, Kellyn can learn at her own pace and do things the way she wants to do them without being bothered.
    • Through experience, Kellyn knows the ways of working that suit her best. She doesn’t do well being micromanaged, for example.
      • “…I know that I’ll be able to be my best me there, that I’ll be able to do things, and no one will be interested in any part of it…not until I’ve turned it into something really, really big and special. Then everybody gravitates to it.” – Kellyn Gorman
      • Kellyn is also preparing herself to do something / build something special and then lose it. She cites this as the biggest hurdle for which she has to prepare.
  • Nick thinks focusing on the doing and the areas that other people aren’t interested in or don’t care about removes the shame of messing up.
    • Kellyn says the hard things come easy to her. It’s the silly details she ends up missing.
    • Kellyn tells the story of a conversation with her son when he was a teenager. He said something about Kellyn being perfect and never messing up.
    • “I always mess up. I don’t give up.” – Kellyn Gorman, speaking to her son
    • Kellyn realized her kids only saw the end product, and most people see her that way too.
    • “I didn’t realize that what people see, even though I talk about the stupid things I’ve done and talk about the challenges that I’ve had, nobody seems to remember that. All they seem to remember is ‘you wrote all these books and you’re doing this, and you designed these systems, and you did Oracle on Azure….’ I don’t think we see ourselves like other people see us. I think we’re much harder on ourselves.” – Kellyn Gorman
  • John says people see the output and don’t see the process, which may be a cognitive bias in humans. We can’t always control the output or the outcome but often want to judge based on these. We can control the process. Maybe when we say we’re trying to control perfectionism what we’re really talking about is an obsession with progress and not giving up.
    • Kelly says it’s also about being satisfied with your output.
      • She recalls walking away from situations that didn’t go as planned but knew she tried her best. In these situations, Kellyn is kind to herself.
      • “If I didn’t do the best that I could have, that’s probably when I’m going to be more persistent and say, ‘you need to try again.’ But there have been situations where I’ve done that, where I’ve just said, ‘you did the best that you could. The output isn’t what you hoped, and you’re going to have to let this one go….’” – Kellyn Gorman
      • Kellyn has seen people she’s mentored and many she admires be very hard on themselves in certain situations despite doing the best they could in the situation.
      • “That’s when perfectionism I think really comes back and bites a person. It really hurts them and harms them…when they don’t understand, ‘you do not control the entirety of this world. You can only control yourself.’” – Kellyn Gorman
    • John thinks when Kellyn is kind to herself or critical of herself, it’s about the process and not about the outcome. For those who are not kind to themselves, the thing they can control and improve is their process.
      • Preparation and interaction with other people are part of process, but we don’t control everything, including how much time we had to do something.

23:05 – Reaching Good Enough by Tuning for Time

  • How do we start to design our processes to accept a quality of output that is good enough? Or does perfectionism force us to think our work must be of the utmost quality regardless of other constraints?
    • Kellyn likes to break things into bite size pieces and determines the level of quality she can produce based on the time she has for that piece. If there is more time, she can revisit and increase the level of quality.
    • Kellyn shares a story of getting asked to do a presentation at a conference the evening before the presentation was to take place.
      • Kellyn wrote the abstract and then worked on the slides that evening for 2 hours and was able to say they were good enough.
      • The next morning Kellyn worked on the slides again to the point where she was totally satisfied with the quality. “But if I didn’t have that time because I was not awake…I would have let them go. I would have been satisfied either way, but I was saying, ‘if I have more time, I will allocate to that. But I would have been happy either way because understanding there were time constraints…this was a last-minute request from somebody. I’m going to knock it out of the park no matter what because I know the topic, but my slides may not be of the pristine level that I like. So that’s kind of how I approach it.” – Kellyn Gorman
      • Kellyn says in this case she did a great job with the presentation and was very happy with it. She focused her topic to fill a gap in content that wasn’t discussed at the event.
  • Kellyn’s story made Nick think that in any given situation there are layers in which we might need to make good enough. Kellyn knew the topic well. That part was of the upmost quality. It was the slides that might have turned out to be good enough based on time constraints. This mirrors decisions Nick has to make when producing the podcast.
    • Kellyn says this comes down to priority also.
    • “What are the things that must be done? What are the things that could be done, and if I have time I’ll allocate more? What are the things that just don’t matter? …I am very much about time management for thigns that are valuable.” – Kellyn Gorman
    • Kellyn does not like having her time wasted and likes to allocate time to only things that are useful or valuable.
  • How did Kellyn learn to delineate efficient uses of time to help herself prioritize?
    • Kellyn feels she’s always been this way.
    • When she works on optimizing database environments, nothing is off the table – the application, the database, the network, or the hardware.
    • “There are reports that you can pull from Oracle that tell you all about what’s using CPU, what’s using I/O, what’s using memory…. I’m always looking at elapsed time…because you tune for time, or you’re wasting time. It’s all about time. What is consuming the time? That to me is efficiency. I think that’s extremely important when you look at all aspects of life. What can I do that is efficient use of time that can provide valuable output, and if it doesn’t provide valuable output, it is a waste of time…. I have to have proof that shows what I allocate time to makes sense.” – Kellyn Gorman
      • Kellyn thinks this is part of AuDHD. People who are autistic understand social cues well but do not accept social cues that don’t make logical sense. The autistic brain also has an insane sense of justice, and these qualities apply to all areas of life.
      • “If it doesn’t make logical sense…if we cannot put order to it, we’re not going to be able to be supportive of it…. Because I see patterns and I see output, I should be able to track it and say, ‘this is an efficient use of my time. There will be productive output of this at the end, and yes, I will do it this way.’” – Kellyn Gorman, on the AuDHD brain
      • Kellyn shares a scenario of co-workers pointing at something specific causing a performance problem in a database environment, but they had no data to back up their claim.
    • John says this sounds like following the scientific method. When we as human beings have a hypothesis, there’s a cognitive bias toward searching for anything that supports what we think might be true. Maybe fighting this bias is a skill?
      • Kellyn does a pretty god job at fighting the bias.
      • “I would not be doing my job if I didn’t request that we have some data behind this before I spend time on it.” – Kellyn Gorman, as a response to colleagues without data backed assumptions of what might be causing a problem
      • John suggests this is coaching and trying to help people get better at their jobs, encouraging them to gather data on their hypotheses.
      • Listen to the story Kellyn shares of being in a meeting where someone just wanted her to agree with them without data.

32:22 – Strengths and Weaknesses in Neurodiversity

  • John highlights Kellyn’s attribution of some of these things to AuDHD. He shares being diagnosed with ADHD as an adult and wishes it had been earlier.
    • John loved spending time on things that were interesting and hated spending time on things he perceived to be unimportant, a waste of time, or just not interesting…regardless of whether the task or tasks would help him make progress on a project.
    • John says he does not feel it is an aspect of his ADHD to hate wasting time.
    • Kellyn says when she is trying to address something tedious, the activity level in her temporal lobe decreases, making it harder to focus. The way Kellyn would compensate for this was to pair up with someone neurotypical.
    • “I could handle this monstrous 95% workload, but he’d come in the last 5% and clean it all up. And then he could go back in the corner and code like he loved to. That’s how I work best…. Little tiny things, tedious little silly things could get away from me. Understanding that and accepting that and accepting those weak points but understanding that I had these massive amount of strengths…this is alright. These weaknesses are alright. How do I find people who can help me to make sure they don’t become an issue? And that’s how I address my ADHD as an adult.” – Kellyn Gorman, on finding people to support her weaknesses
    • John mentions compensating behaviors like staying organized also help him.
    • Kellyn likes to switch between tasks constantly to keep activity up in her temporal lobe so nothing becomes boring.
      • Kellyn asks managers to load up her task list and clearly communicate the deadline for different items. Then she can start working through the tasks in her own way (and finishing all of them).
      • “It’s the way that I work. Because I know that way it can’t become tedious if I’m constantly task switching and moving about different things. It works wonderful for me. It’s not for everyone, but it does work with my ADHD.” – Kellyn Gorman
      • John has a little bit more hyperfocus, and he mentions there is one label of ADHD that applies to many executive functioning issues.

36:08 – No Fear in Asking for Help or Giving Help to Others

  • John asks about being self-taught. When we’re teaching ourselves something and just starting, it can seem overwhelming with so much material to learn. Did Kellyn combat perfectionism when learning new things through time calibration or using some other tool?
    • Kellyn says it’s partly that she’s not afraid to ask for help. Going back to that first SQL Server she inherited (which we referenced earlier), the database team was not on speaking terms with the application and user support team.
    • “So, for 3 weeks, I banged my head against a wall trying to figure out SQL Server, trying to figure out how to do this; and I was incredibly overwhelmed. I finally said, ‘that’s it. I’m not doing this. This is not a smart idea.’ So, I walked into the manager of that entire team (development as well as users), and I said, ‘so I hear that the DBA team and the…team are not on speaking terms…. I’d like to change that right now, right here.’ I was a brand-new DBA. I had nothing to lose…. I could not have done that job without them….learning from the application developers, learning from the people who used this application every day, understanding the data…. I had to go them, show weakness…and I learned a lot. They knew I was willing to put in the time to understand and learn SQL Server.” – Kellyn Gorman
      • This database contained all pipeline data for the western US for Duke Energy. Kellyn had never worked on SQL, never managed databases, and was suddenly responsible for managing all of the hourly and daily data.
      • To learn SQL Server scoured documentation. She also learned how to calculate lock escalation for database tables (which impressed Microsoft).
  • Kellyn is giving back to the people on her team now, recommending O’Reilly books by specific trustworthy authors.
    • Kellyn has followed these authors and their content for years. She knows whether what they write is valuable, and this is a critical skill in a world where some of the content out there is written by people who don’t truly understand the subject matter.
    • Kellyn shares a discussion she had with someone else in the Oracle community about being part of the last generation that will understand Oracle.
      • Things in the cloud are black boxes, and no one is talking about the internals (architecture, diagrams, etc.).
      • “For my folks that I’m working with right now teaching them Oracle I have written in 4 months 250 pages, and I told them I’m going to turn it into a book. And I’m going to call it ‘All the Documentation Oracle Forgot to Write….’ This is why they can’t get the answers. There are no answers out there. It’s really interesting that we are saying everything is a black box. Nobody needs to know how it works. And the truth is if you don’t understand how it works, it’s really difficult to develop for it. It’s really difficult to troubleshoot it…. It’s really challenging as folks are trying to learn, trying to become more, and some of the old ways…it always returns to us as being the most valuable…. The way we taught ourselves, we had to really work with it…. We were building out real application clusters manually across networks that couldn’t handle it, and it was amazing. It was amazing what we were able to comprehend from that where now you can just go out to the cloud, and it does it all for you with a couple clicks.” – Kellyn Gorman, discussing that being self-taught today is different than it once was

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