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Comment by AsyncAwait | Hacker News Reader

Agree with this. There's the whole DevOps nowdays as well, which basically just shifts what used to be an entirely separate, full-time, role onto the developer. Adding DBA to that sounds like it would benefit noone, except perhaps business owners looking for short-term savings at the expense of productivity, ala open-office floor plans.

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Keep in mind that full time role used to be a hell of a lot of work. Take the project I'm working on right now: https://gist.github.com/ajbdev/11f494906ebb6aa3f6bdf35f2437e...

In ~50 lines of code I can erect a load balanced set of web servers with my app binary preloaded, secured in a private VPN subnet with an auto-scaling policy attached to it.

15 years ago this project would have meant:

- Racking new hardware somewhere on premise

- Configuring several routers and networking equipment

- Tweaking the different software responsible for the different app layers (load balancing, web servers, etc)

- Hoping we forecasted demand correctly and whatever hardware we racked can handle a traffic spike or growth surge

You needed a lot more expertise back then.

And really you can trade all of what I'm doing for a higher level of abstraction that requires even less knowledge of the underlying technology (netlify, heroku, amplify, etc) if you're willing to pay a little more.

In most places I have worked, knowing the database well enough to manage it and at very least write stored procedures has always been expected from developers writing database related code.

I have been doing this for a little more than 30 years now, so it isn't "nowadays" thing.

Sure, knowing your database well enough to "manage it" in terms of indexes, bloat, writing procedures, that's a developer responsibility.

What is "new", is developers having to manage the DB backups, k8s clusters, Docker images, Terraform, load balancers, CI/CD, proxies etc.

This used to be a role for a whole another role. Some places do have an "Ops" role, but most tasks are still expected off the developer, with Ops at best providing a helping hand, rather than taking over a task completely.

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