I find that those professional rules/code of conduct are often not lived up to with little or no repercussions and therefore arguing that they provide something more than symbolic value is hard for me to swallow. Lets be real, in most cases you have to violate them pretty egregiously before any action is taken.

Even in our industry there are segments that have stiff rules of compliance such as for the medical device industry. Having to "reboot" a pacemaker isn't going to be acceptable in almost any case. Or having an infusion pump go crazy and dump a whole bag of morphine into a patient isn't acceptable. So the IT side of these industries are much more highly scrutinized than others.

Trust is hard to quantify, you assign a person you just met a certain value of trust and the value goes up or down depending on their actions. There are people I just met that I trust more than some I have known for decades because I KNOW I can't trust that other person through their actions.

DBAs are a particularly tricky aspect because we have access to virtually everything and usually right away. So I think we need to be especially careful about our actions.

CEWII

(fixed spelling error in edit)