The Future of DBAs: History Rhymes
Eitan Blumin recently wrote a post about the future of the DBA career in which he talked about the rise of jack-of-all-trades IT professionals. It’s a good post. You should read it. I did, and over the last 20 years, I’m pretty sure I’ve read a dozen variations of that post.
There’s a saying: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
To give an example, let’s rewind the clock back to 2008. Business Intelligence was all the rage. SQL Server shipped with Analysis Services, Integration Services, and Reporting Services all inside the box. I remember hearing, “You have to learn all of these tools, or else you’re gonna be a dinosaur. Nobody’s gonna only know the engine anymore. You have to know everything else too, or you won’t get a job.”
So for a while, people were misled into believing they needed to know a little bit about everything. Unfortunately, you only have so many hours per month for learning, and a lot of people wasted a lot of time learning things – only to never actually use those tools.
It took a few years, but the ‘experts’ saying that stuff finally quieted down. The world made it clear that business intelligence and database administration are two different careers – I mean, really, they’re lots of different careers. They just happen to work with data, in the same way that gynecologists and cardiologists both work with the human body.
Today, those ‘experts’ are chanting a new song that just happens to rhyme with the old ones:
- “You have to learn every database, or else you won’t be able to find a job working with just one!”
- “You have to learn the cloud, or else you’ll never find a job working on-premises!”
- “You have to learn to use AI as a tool, or else you won’t be able to get a job!”
Should you learn? Absolutely. But can you learn everything? Absolutely not. Given your limited time, you need a strategy for where your career is going. If you don’t have one, watch my 300-Level Guide to Career Internals.
You have a future. It can be as a database administrator, if that’s what you’re passionate about. It can also be as something else! But don’t let some talking head “expert” tell you what specific technologies you have to learn to stay relevant, because they can’t see the future any better than you can.
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Excellent post Brent….Thank you for sharing Kerwin
“…they can’t see the future any better than you can.” Well said. Nice post, Brent. Thanks.
I have bounced all around the various parts of IT mostly because I get bored easily and I like learning new stuff. That said, the idea that you should be 1 ft deep and a 1 mi wide is just not correct. IT teams full of buzz word chasers are always on shifting ground, and about as reliable for a business to build their foundation on. The thing I’ve learned working for both a ReallyBigCorp and a LargeButLocalCorp is that lots of these trends are pushed by consultants who have a financial interest in selling services to businesses and often don’t stick around when things have to be walked back. They don’t pay the surprise seven figure cloud bills because they didn’t tell leadership that all the apps have to be refactored for the cloud to deliver savings over internal hosting.
AI will change the way that we work and will probably help ease the pain that many of us feel with teams cut down to the bone after rounds of layoffs over the years. But the idea that we don’t need SMEs to design systems and help fix problems created through the same antipatterns everyone who reads this blog knows by glancing at a query plan is just wrong. By all means learn a lot about a lot of things, but you need to know enough to become *the* key person in your org on a subject or at least one of them. Don’t decide that watching a YouTube video to get enough words to glide through a manager meeting on the subject is enough, or you might find yourself as the person answering questions on why everything’s on fire when you said the design was fine. Learn enough that your vendor can’t lead you astray with features that never work. Learn enough that you can call developers and vendors out for delivering bad code and products.
AI will change nothing. If you think that we can program a system that is smarter than we are, you are delusional.
I don’t think that it will be smarter than we are, but it will be there to be a second set of eyes to do a quick and dirty code review for you before checking something in, you. Brent’s documented some pretty clever uses for helping for DBA work as long as you know that it’s kinda dumb and only useful for menial stuff. I’m not saying it’s going to be like you finally get a team the size you like, but you do have an agent to do stuff for you on demand. That’s what it’s going to change. It’s an additive tool, not a standalone solution. Probably if we just called these LLMs/Predictive Learning Models/ stuck with Machine Learning, or anything other than the Google/OpenAI marketing speak of trying to pitch these as science fiction level AI, this discourse would be a lot less fraught.
My upper mgmt is all about the “WE NEED TO GET AI NOW!” and every time my team pushes back with, “for what? How will you train AI? What’s the actual problem you’re trying to solve?” because mgmt has a bad habit of picking a “solution” without actually having a problem…
Sigh. Just like they bought into dashboarding with a vengeance, and then two years later we quietly decommissioned those servers without anyone even noticing.
Sad. Really sad.
You’re not alone in that. I’ve been in a couple of companies that had that “use the latest thing NOW” mindset. We had similar results, too. 🙂
Well said. If you cannot state the business case for your issue, get the heck out of my cube.
As the great philosopher Yogi Berra once said, “Predictions are hard. Especially about the future!”
Thank you Brent. Spot on. I have 34 years as a software developer so far. Pundits have been telling me that the mainframe was going to take my job away since day one. Guess what. As we say here in Texas, business is business. Business people still need business technology. So far as I can tell, that will never change. I don’t believe one lying word those people tell me.
While I think it’s important to have a general concept _about_ those new techs, I agree that we don’t need to be experts in them. Know that you can use SS*S? Sure. Be able to implement it? Maybe/maybe not. Know that postgresql or MySQL are options? Yup. Be able to set up complex HADR solutions for them? Probably not.
I think a general knowledge of some cloud concepts isn’t a bad thing – but mostly a “good/bad/ugly” idea when people want to talk about moving to the cloud. If your company isn’t going to the cloud, it’s not a skillset that will have value to them. Knowing that cloud solutions tend to be really IO-constrained can be helpful, though.
As a data profession, especially a DBA, knowing that there are options is a good thing. You don’t have to be an expert to maintain some level of awareness. I don’t think you need to “learn this or be left behind” as we so often hear, but we should know that some other options exist. Even then, that’s not a “know all the options out there” – that’s just not realistic. But knowing some of the major options is a good thing.
Technology has a half life of five years. That means that everything you learned five years ago, half of it is obsolete and useless. “Expert in Technology” what does that even mean. Nothing. Be an expert in business and deliver technology.
The key to success is to specialize:- learn more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing – and they find someone who will pay you to maintain that nothing.
Also, find employers who want intelligent lazy people such as yourself, you know that doing things right is a lot less hassle than doing them badly repeatedly, and that you can maintain many more systems because you’ve learned how to do the job properly.
Lastly, technology rapidly evolves – if you learn the fundamentals you can leap from version 1 to version 5 without bothering with 2/3/4 because they are as redundant as version 1 – update thoroughly when necessary not when some marketing person is promoting a product version you will never use.
And that’s why there’s the old saying ‘Jack of all trades, master of none’.