I've been interviewing after being laid of in March (my place was acquired and they reorganized a number of us out of the company) and two things came up this week that surprised me.

At one place, they were looking for a developer / DBA with the work being about 80% development and 20% what they called "light DBA work."  They asked some basic questions related to backups / restores.  They then told me that they had a number of candidates who couldn't answer these questions at all (they were happy with my answers).  While I know DBA (like Agile and Business Intelligence) means different things to different people / organizations, I would think you should know some basics of administering a database if you're applying for a DBA role.  Whenever I interviewed a DBA candidate and asked them "what are your first three priorities when you come in," I better hear "check that databases are being backed up (and restores being tested periodically)."

At another place, one of the DBAs was interviewing me and saw I had upgraded our BI environment to 2016 and asked me why.  They are on 2012.  I explained about the improvements to the database engine, Create or Alter (should be reason enough), and a lot of improvements to the BI stack (while I got my SSAS cubes to 2016, I wasn't able to implement a tabular instance :().  He had no idea about any of the changes that came with 2016.  I'm definitely not someone who obsesses over SQL.  I don't build databases just for fun after hours but I do follow a number of blogs (and some forums) to keep track of what's going on in the SQL Server community (I could definitely be more active in the community).  I do set up test instances at work (at least I did) to try things and see if they're practical for my needs.  One of the things I love about working in technology is that it's constantly evolving which means there are always new things to learn.

Am I crazy to be surprised or have you found this to be semi-normal?