I'm a developer who fell into the DBA role because we had no DBA. So for years I was 80% developer, 20% DBA, before I switched into full-time DBA. I think it's resulted in me being a more pragmatic DBA because I still remember what it's like to ship a release against a tight deadline. And honestly, I rather miss coding.

In the end, while I am responsible for the health of the servers and the integrity of the data, I believe my ultimate responsibility is to deliver solutions that enable the business to achieve their goals. And that sometimes means speed of project delivery over completely optimized database operations. I'd rather enable than obstruct.

In my limited experience, because I'm willing to help, developers who are weaker with T-SQL will seek me out and ask me to assist with complex queries. Those developers end up learning a lot about T-SQL and need less help in the future.

Have I let some queries go that make me cringe? Sure. But I also know that I've written some cringe-worthy queries in the past for code that had to be delivered quickly, and miraculously they didn't result in significant impact on database efficiency. So I have a lot of sympathy for developers who are under the gun.