In this case, I don't entirely agree with you, Steve. In my work situation things go from hard to harder. 3 years ago we had 5 people in our IT department: 1 manager who occasionally programmed, and was excellent at hardware issues; 1 part time student who did our DBA work; and 3 developers (I was one of the 3). However, before that year was out we lost the student and he was never replaced. I became the accidental DBA, because I happen to know more about SQL Server than anyone else. Last year one of the 3 developers died, and has never been replaced. In March the IT manager quit and will not be replaced. That leaves just 2 of us, who are, remember, first developers. Neither of us have hardware experience. Neither of us are network administrators. Between the 2 of us, I did take 1 SQL Server administration course (for SQL 2005), so that also contributes to my being placed in the role. But using the terminology you introduced in your article, I guess my management thinks that a DBA is a tax, because believe me, they have no intention of replacing that student we lost 3 years ago. Now, perhaps in our situation that's not such a bad thing, because we only have 1 production SQL Server server, and 1 test SQL Server server. We have 5 servers in all, however most of those servers are old and have gone off of warranty, and my management isn't willing to pay the money to either replace the servers or renew the warranties. I live in fear that one of those old servers will die. If either the other developer or I were to leave, then it would really hurt the agency badly, and it certainly would put the person staying behind in a horrible situation (no more vacation, no sick leave allowed, etc).

Bottom line: if the agency is small enough, they don't want a DBA. They're not willing to pay that "DBA tax". They'll make anyone who has any IT experience be the developer, administrator, PC tech, help desk, network engineer and of course DBA.