| I think you make some very good points, but I have to disagree rather strongly with this one: > My general experience with DBAs, sysadmins, techs and the like is that they generally resent you for asking them to do things, making the entire experience unpleasant. I'm not sure if such people are attracted to such positions or such positions end up making such people but whatever the case, "surly" is a commonly appropriate adjective to use. I've spent 15 years working in a variety of positions in IT, from tech support, to developer, to sysadmin, to supervisor, to architect/design engineer. My experience with DBAs and sysadmins is that they rarely resent you for asking them to do things. However, they may very well resent the way you ask them to do things. Much of modern society is very me-focused, impatient, and with short attention spans. This goes double for the corporate business world. When many people run into a technical problem, they tend to want an immediate response and an immediate resolution to their problem, expecting everyone else to drop everything and attend to them. Their problem affects them, therefore it is the most important problem around right now. What they fail to appreciate and understand, is that many DBAs and SysAdmins are supporting systems and infrastructure that has importance much greater than you. Yes, you have a problem, and yes, they want to help you. But they have visibility into things with potentially much greater impact than you, and those things may have a higher priority and importance than your problem. An example I saw just a few weeks ago. I had a problem that needed attention from a sysadmin. I went to the guy who could fix it, and there was someone already at his desk. I waited outside his cube, and listened to the guy already there bitch at him. Apparently the guy had an application that was having issues, and he couldn't work on his report until the application was fixed. He wanted the sysadmin to drop everything to fix it, and he wasn't happy at being told that the sysadmin was busy with something else, and couldn't help him until it was fixed. After yelling guy finally left, I ducked my head in and asked him if something was blowing up. He nodded distractedly and said that the server a PostgreSQL database ran on was misbehaving, and that the DB was utilized by an application used by 3 different business units and dozens of people. I offered my sympathy, told him I needed his help, but it could obviously wait until he fixed this problem, and said I'd e-mail him the details. He thanked me for being understanding (twice), and called me as soon as he'd fixed the server issue to help me out. > The cliche of the bearded UNIX purist exists for a reason. I'm afraid you're going to have to explain the reason for this one. The bitchiest guy I know at work is clean shaven, and the nicest guy I know has a full beard. Exactly what reason is there behind your negative beard perception? ;-) |