alt Hacker NewsThere are many good reasons why the industry largely moved away from having DBAs as a specialist position. But one downside I've seen is that it's increasingly common to have teams decide to just switch platforms without fully exploring whether that's really necessary.
I'm not really surprised. Data storage and data access technology is a pretty large subject all by itself, and a "jack of all, master of none" developer might never develop the expertise needed to properly optimize a database.
with the caveat being that I came into the industry in 2014 so I may have missed the golden age of the DBA fully - I worked for a DBMS vendor on sales/solutions side for a while and most DBA’s I spoke to were slightly more knowledgeable business analysts. I met very few who really understood IO and Paging and Locks and how they’d impact a DB’s performance. Which kind of makes sense because if you were really obsessively into that you’d probably do something different or you’d work for a business dealing in storage systems. The value a DBA has been very low in my career outside of forcing process improvement just by saying no to things.