Wow this really rubs me the wrong way! I guess we value different things and you wouldn't respect me, luckily I don't obsess over acceptance from strangers :crazy: 😛

I know some DBAs who fit your profile, they can learn a lot of technical minutiae rapidly and retain it to bring up in meetings ad-nausea. I'll admit it's a very cool and unique skill to have but in my experience those same people are usually also: extremely abrasive, create bug-riddled code, don't care about formatting or documentation to the point of making everything unreadable and unmaintainable, and every task seems to become an exercise in obfuscation and job security.

But management loves them because they answer, "Yes", to everything! They're heroes, constantly putting out the fires they themselves have caused in production from their arrogance 🙂 I can't say I don't respect them, I do, in many ways, but ... not every way.

If I had to specifically single out some criteria for respect, it would be the methodical DBAs who tick the boxes properly; I don't care if it takes someone longer to learn something because learning shouldn't be treated as a competition. I would hazard a guess that they are more curious about testing and understanding the "why" of things and hitting them with hammers until they click... as opposed to reading one article after another to pass another certification and boast about how smart they are.