I think what Travis is referring to is something that I've recently encountered and it does have quite a bit to do with "work ethic". While it's certainly not possible for just one person to know everything there is to know, if you run into a situation where you need to ask for help, then you need to spend some time burning the midnight oil studying. If you're a really good DBA, you might spend some serious time studying before you run into a problem.

As Gail pointed out, absolute honesty and intgrity are paramount in my requirements for both DBAs and Developers. Right after that, I value intellectual curiosity and the drive to teach oneself new things before they're need. If you're not going to invest in yourself, why should I invest in you?

On the opposite end of the spectrum and quite disappointing are the people that I've interviewed in the last year or so. 4 "dbas" and only 4 out of 20 or so "developers" even knew how to get the current date and time using T-SQL. The really shocking part was that none of the "dbas" could explain clustered and non-clustered indexes even though their resumes claimed "expertise in performance tuning" and they claim to have been "dbas" for between 7 and 10 years.