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Comment by steve_adams_86 | Hacker News Reader

This is strange and funny to read; the only two DBAs I’ve worked with matched this description perfectly.

The first guy was so irate and literally yelling about his entitlement to punish us for making bad architectural decisions that I thought he was joking. I just laughed, but he got angrier. Then it clicked after maybe five or ten seconds – he was in the process of verbally punishing us for querying the database too much.

The second guy was similar, but didn’t yell. Still super protective of his domain, almost antagonistic about us integrating with the database at all.

Both brilliant, taught me more than I can recount here, hilarious and interesting… But total jerks too, and both let go more or less for that reason.

One they had a great system in place and the product felt mature, the companies axed them.

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The DBA career did seem to nurture some big egos. They had the keys to the castle, a lot of technical sway and could also have a big impact.

They also earnt good money for a while. When I worked for Oracle, there were lots of stories of Oracle consultants being payed day rates which would still be considered high today.

I’ve seen the same ego with network engineers, they setup some switches and configure a couple vlans but act like they’re the fucking shit because they have a cert.

I think this kind of conflict often comes from frustration at developers not having much understanding of the underlying technology that the network engineer / DBA is responsible for.

Networks & DBs present abstractions, but they're very leaky ones, yet developers often expect to just treat them as magical black boxes about which they don't need to know much of the inner workings, constraints, tradeoffs etc. That makes the interface between the network engineer or DBA and software developers a natural site of conflict.

(You even see this above in this very thread, someone complaining that a DBA was punishing developers for "querying the database too much". Most likely the DBA was actually upset about how they were querying the database, not that they were querying it too much, but the developers want it to "just work" so the distinction isn't important to them.)

So what if per request it makes 1001 sql queries that do a full table scan each? It works!

Isn't that their job? Your mechanic doesn't berate you for being a crappy driver, they get paid to fix your car when it isn't working

If you turn up a few times after destroying the gearbox from shifting into reverse on the highway, they might have a word. I don't condone the berating, I just mean to point out the source of the conflict [0]. A car (especially a modern one) abstracts away its insides much better than a database or network does, too.

[0] The mechanic is also being paid by you to fix your screwup, in proportion to the severity of the screwup. Your colleague is not.

Would they though? The profit margin on replacing a gearbox is pretty good, just like Dba wages

Most mechanics I know would grumble a bit after the third time. It's a bear of a job, and they'd make more profit doing twenty oil changes in the same amount of time.

The DBA's job doesn't generally extend to fixing your code to use database features correctly, write SQL in a sane way, etc. Even if it does at your company, unlike the mechanic they're not being paid by you to do that work; they get their salary regardless. So it's natural that if you keep bringing unpleasant work to them because you're bad at your own job, they're going to get upset.

I think a better analogy would be the engineering team we see frantically trying to keep the engines together in Sci-Fi movies/TV. The DBA is on the same ship as everyone else!

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