• Koen Verbeeck (6/13/2012)


    L' Eomot Inversé (6/13/2012)


    ..., rather than assuming one of those arrogant developer-hating sql-hating know-nothing DBAs?

    Hmmm, do I sense some frustration? 😀

    No, not frustration. DBAs like that can, when I meet them, induce not frustration but a very bloody-minded fury. Any frustration I felt about DBAs evaporated decades ago.

    Not frustration, because mostly I've been in jobs where I've had control of developer and dba recruitment, so that type could only frustrate me by wasting my time scanning their CVs and I've long recovered from that. 😀 Even when I didn't have full control, I usually had a recruitment veto (since the late 70s, anyway, and I didn't meet any DBAs before then) so my main frustration was with my inability to get them to get existing junior DBAs to learn to be competent - that was before I realised that some people are just plain unable to learn technical stuff (and others, like myself, are just plain unable to learn literary criticism or how to be kind to and patient with obstructive red-tape wallahs, despite those abilities being just as important as the ones I have and some others don't).

    But know-it-all know-nothing DBAs do exist - and although they don't get a chance to frustrate me they do infuriate me when I encounter them; they hold their jobs by being good at propaganda, at CYA, and denigating anyone who is actually competent as a DBA, and get away with it because too many companies have totally non-technical management. It's entirely analagous to politicians in our democracies - they survive only because the electorate is incompetent at evaluating politicians; maybe someday we will relearn the lessons that the French learnt between the middle of 1787 and September 1793, and the establishment will cease to be a problem; of course that applies to DBAs of a certain calibre, as well as to most politicians.

    edit:1793, not 1783. I think it was the 5th when the reign of terror founded on the good Joseph-Ignace's invention is usually accepted as beginning, although the device had been used on occassion before.

    Tom