This growth in the nummber of people hoding a job despite lacking the essential skills and having no intention of learning them isn't a phenomenon restricted to DBA, it has hit many other jobs too. Things have changed in many professions.

It changed because a large number of people got into the DBA game who weren't interested in what the database was for or what was achieved using it - they saw it as their job to ensure that the DB was backed up properly (but it was almost impossible to convince them that backups should be tested regularly), that plenty of disc space was available, that tape copies of the backups were made and stored off-site, that no-one wrote any SQL other than embedded SQL in Cobol or C++ or whatever, and to set up usernames and passwords and permissions through whatever GUI was available. Not only would they not write DML, they didn't even want to write DDL - databases, tables, and views were created and managed through the GUI, not using SQL. Developers were not be be allowed to create tables (other than temp tables) or stored procedures (so there were no stored procedures because those DBAs couldn't). They would explain their recovery schemes to management, but not to development - so no risk of anyone noticing the recovery plan was unworkable nonsense unless a disaster actually happened.

How did these people get into thise jobs? By being good at talking and using jargon to sound as if they know what they are talking about. DBA isn't the only job that such people are polluting, I've known middle-managers in software development who couldn't write a basic "hello world" program but were convinced that they could take decisions about programming, others in engineering who thought a baud was the same as one bit per second but also thought they were qualified to define data communications strategy, yet others who thought that bandwidth was the sole determiner of information transfer rate, neither noise nor redundant encoding had any effect (those were so numerous and made such an impression on ignorant technical journalists that "bandwidth" is now regularly misused to meaa "data transmission rate"). Senior manaufacturing managers who think using cheap components is OK because a 10% cost reduction is more important than a 90% reputation disaster think that heir accountancy "skills" trump the engineering skills of teh manufacturing engineer. All these are people who got into positions of power because they could talk nonsense while fooling senior managers into believing they were talking sense.

But all is not lost. We still have some who call themselves DBAs who are comptent developers, and some who call themselves developers who can do all the DBA jobs if they need to. Of course the DBAs that Jefff interviewed over the last two years prbably hold responsible positions in their current employment, so there are another 5 companies probably heading for disaster; but it's not universal, thank heaven.