You're too focused on the idea that those generalist are a bunch of skill-less dipshits. As one of those generalist skill-less dipshits, my calloused perspective is that DBAs are the absolute most obstinate, narrow minded twats that exist in any sort of enterprise arena - worse than that PM you probably hate. They just suck! I can think of maybe one DBA who didn't flatout stink of the 20 or so I've worked with. For some reason, there's just a complete lack of understanding of anything that's NOT a database, even though their database understanding is so incredibly deep. Y'all could use some more generalists.

An example of an obstinate DBA is one from my last place, who I wanted to take root access from. She had root ssh keys all over the place, sudoers entries in random places, passwords in her history, etc. It was a security nightmare. She absolutely refused to allow me to take away her root access. She wouldn't even allow any discussion. Her reason? "I need root to install mysql". Management agreed.

There's a reason "That's something a DBA would do." has become a running joke at multiple places I've worked at.

Edit to add: These problems could easily be solved if there was less silo'ing going on. If everything but the database is awful, then that's an indication of deeper, awful and likely legacy problems, not just with the generalists.

In this specific case it's because I've been working with the quality of dipshits in the departments they are being pulled from, over the past few years. They are going to be cross-trained by dipshits from those other departments, so that they can become even worse generalists.

Hmmm. They don't care about backing up servers. They don't care about HA cluster alarms or failovers. They don't notice or proactively monitor disks filling despite being the sole custodian of the Enterprise monitoring solution. They don't care about Windows security logging policies or even the power plans. They manage AD but let service accounts expire all the time instead of following anyone up first; leading to many outages.

I'm struggling to think of anything good they do. There's no quality or pride to their work; they use GUIs. They get by because the few time I've seen other managers criticise their boss, that boss has then filed official complaints of harassment - and then everything quiets down and goes back to the status quo.

> there's just a complete lack of understanding of anything that's NOT a database

Guilty as charged. I don't care about anything outside of the database because it's not my job ;-) However I do know a little about the server level backups, clustering, performance counters, security settings, and such - anything that affects my uptime - and I monitor it, unlike the people who are paid to do so.

> An example of an obstinate DBA is one from my last place, who I wanted to take root access from.

Oracle people have root access on Oracle boxes. We have admin access on Windows boxes. It's extremely difficult for just a few staff to manage hundreds of servers in a high quality fashion otherwise.

> There's a reason "That's something a DBA would do." has become a running joke at multiple places I've worked at.

There are plenty of shit DBAs, and obviously there are good Infrastructure people as well especially on HN. I hope you realise - that DBA you were talking about - likely isn't bothering to read HN either. I am somewhere near the top middle of my profession.

> These problems could easily be solved if there was less silo'ing going on

Totally agreed.

> then that's an indication of deeper, awful and likely legacy problems, not just with the generalists.

Entrenched management and yes-men-or-you're-fired culture.

Do you work in finance? These problems you're describing are all too familiar.