I generally tend to agree with this, but the disappearing act is more often a detriment to the career of a DBA. Few people remember that the servers ran for 10 months without a hiccup and few people will care that the cause of that one hiccup was bad code released or perhaps a hardware failure. They'll remember that one hiccup if the DBA hasn't done some self-promotion. It's very easy for the DBA to be completely satisfied with being an unknown player and I'll admit that I like that to some extent as well. I just know that if the only time my name tends to come up is when the servers are having trouble, that's a bad thing. Even if I fix the problem quickly and prevent it from happening again, it won't matter as much. Kind of like newspaper stories may tear people down but never follow up when those people are found innocent, or if they do - only in a short corrective article buried somewhere in the paper.

Some good thoughts, but I think career-wise, the DBA should definitely be encourage to do more self-promotion if they're not doing any currently.