• What I have observed living as a DBA in the worlds of Sybase ASE, SQL Server, and Oracle:

    Developers, for the most part, are focused on meeting functional specifications and deadlines as a result of managers who impose rigid timelines on them and then less than optimally peforming code falls in the DBA lap to solve. The managers impose the timelines because they are scrambling to meet less than flexible demands from the business-users and are unwilling to push back, most likely due to concerns about their career path (or even their job path).

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    I see the world of IT as having become more and more complex, with expectations of faster and faster response times andor throughputs, but an unwillingness to allow those hired as subject matter expects to perform the jobs they have been asked to do. I submit That extra up-front time to allow the IT folks to think it through is more likely to result in a better end-result than not.

    There seems to be a continual need for the Jerry Maguire "Help me help you" up and down the org chart as a starting point to get everyone focused on the ideas that "we are all in this togther" and therefore can accomplish more by working together than apart.