Yay or Nay?

I'll say definitely Yay!!!

In my experience (15 yr) of recruiting, I've interviewed somewhere between 500-600 people and went over thousands of CVs to pick those top 500. Not all of them were as good as I hoped in day 1, but the only ones that lasted long and did well on their jobs were the ones with vast experience in OTHER fields. We're talking about C# programmers that were computer technicians before, business analysts that were programmers before, etc.

The reason is that today, almost anything can be done by any tool: You can calculate tables in MS Word and design good looking text in Excel. The issue is choosing the right tool for the right job. You need to know your tool's capabilities, but more over,have a true knowledge of its LIMITATIONS.

DBA is no different than that: If you're really good you might know HOW to do that using SQL; But If you have experience, you will know IF you should do that in SQL in the first place.

Yay it is!!!