sturner (3/28/2012)
I have seen this over and over again through the years. More often than not, VB programmers were self-taught or migrated to VB from vbscript (or VBA like with excell). Very few people have the discipline or aptitude to self teach C++... and some don;t get it even after getting exposed to it in college course.
Haha, you just described me. I am self taught in all the C++, C#, VB, T-SQL, and PL/SQL. A bit of terminology I cannot directly relate but I can code circles around many of the vets and college kids who can talk the talk. Sometimes I think self teaching if you do have the aptitude has the bennifit of not being weighed down with the baggage of this is the way it happens versus it can be done better another way. Very rarely do I find anyone who can talk the talk and walk the walk in true defined understanding.
sturner (3/28/2012)
Randy Rabin (3/28/2012)
I'm not sure that pure programming is completely relevant to being a DBA, but Data Structure and Relational Set theory definitely should be. Every DBA should fundamentally know what a B-Tree is.IMHO 🙂
Lacking knowledge of programming languages and platforms (i.e .NET) or good programming techniques will put you at a severe disadvantage at my company (and probably most that have developers). If you can't provide guidance to people who are quite capable of bringing your server to its knees with a few dozen lines of code you are in for some difficulties.
Actually it depends on what your role within the company is as to if it will put you at a disadvantage. A DBA at some companies may not have any need beyond making it run and the programmers are the ones wholly responsible for the code and what affect it has. Sounds like your company has a mixed requirement on the DBA job in that they must understand development and design as well as the service itself.