RE: Oracle DBA opening in Englewood, CO

In my book it's the old 80/20 rule: 80% of your problems come from 20% of your people. I work with DBA's, developers, and end users, and yet some of my dumbest questions come from my co-workers!

I do hold developers to a higher standard than end users though, so I expect them to have a basic understanding of Oracle and relational db's in general.

The stupid questions usually don't bother me, unless I'm having a bad day, and by in large I'm a pretty patient person. It's the same stupid question over and over again from the same person that I can't handle. Like the guy who asked me three times in as many hours how to generate a spool file showing the SQL commands. I told him he'd better write himself a note because if I had to do it for him it would get stapled to his forehead! Unfortunately all he's learned to do is not ask *me* the same question twice, which I guess is an improvement of sorts. He's definitely in the 20%. *sigh*

Just my 2 cents...

• Anita
  • Bruce Page <bpage_at_kimball.com> wrote:
    > I was a developer for a few years, then a DBA for a
    > couple, then went into
    > application support, became a development DBA, and
    > then a support DBA, then
    > a Unix system administrator, and now doing level 2
    > DBA support.
    >
    > I have covered the whole ball of wax. Developers
    > are supposed to be IT
    > professionals. It is one thing for a newbie to ask
    > stupid questions, that
    > is how they learn. It is another for developers
    > that are supposed to be
    > experienced asking stupid questions. They should
    > know what manuals to look
    > in to get their answers. They should know how to
    > run an explain plan. End
    > users are not IT professionals. The standard for
    > them is a lot lower, since
    > they have other jobs to do. I have only worked for
    > 1 company where IT was a
    > real profit center. It's business was providing IT
    > services to other
    > companies. All other companies I have worked for,
    > IT was a support service
    > for the business. End users are out there trying to
    > make money for the
    > company, most IT shops only aids other parts of the
    > company in making money.
    >
    > End users are who we need to get along with.
    >
    > I agree there are dense ones on all sides and we all
    > need to learn to do our
    > jobs and get them done.
    >
    >
    > -----Original Message-----
    > Sent: Wednesday, May 17, 2000 3:16 PM
    > To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
    >
    >
    > We should be more understanding of developers. Just
    > because they don't
    > understand some of the concepts that a DBA would
    > doesn't make them stupid.
    > They do their job, we do ours. We are the database
    > experts, so they come to
    >
    > us with database questions. That's part of our
    > job--helping developers with
    >
    > database issues. I get kind of tired of DBAs
    > picking on developers. True,
    > there are some dense developers out there, but there
    > are some dense DBAs out
    >
    > there too.
    >
    > Why can't we all just get along?
    >
    > Steve Boyd
    >
    > >From: Bruce Page <bpage_at_kimball.com>
    > >Reply-To: ORACLE-L_at_fatcity.com
    > >To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
    > <ORACLE-L_at_fatcity.com>
    > >Subject: RE: Oracle DBA opening in Englewood, CO
    > >Date: Wed, 17 May 2000 09:44:59 -0800
    > >
    > >Let me guess... you are the only developer in your
    > shop or they all have
    > >more experience than you.
    > >
    > >I have received as many stupid questions from
    > developers as I have from end
    > >users. And end users do not write code to go
    > against my databases.
    >
    

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