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Admin
While I understand that the "original submitter" and Front-Pageification Process might have left out details because of reasons, this story feels half-finished without any closing words from the boss.
Has this Awesomeness reached the boss' ears? If not, Dave is TRWTF for continuing the myth that this DBA is legendary.
Admin
Oh, man, saw that one coming. :facepunch:
Admin
I'm here:
Prediciton: DBA fucks up the code.
Edit: Nope; got that call way wrong…
Admin
Of course Awesome is on a salary about three times as big as Dave's and he will get a huge bonus for this job when Dave gets it working.
Admin
Being legendary is not the same as being good. Grendel, Loki and the Cyclops are all legendary. And I have come across DBAs that combined characteristics of some or all of them.
Seriously, what kind of organisation is so clueless that there isn't a proper method of integrating the work of the DBAs and the application developers? This should be one of the primary jobs of technical management.
Admin
That's the ending we deserved, but not the one we needed. Or whatever.
It's another case of incompetence being supported by management. Management support counts for way too much when it comes to technical solutions. Either that or I've had some REALLY bad examples of management competence.
Admin
Admin
There's your
oxymoronproblem, right there.Admin
Dave is not Awesome's boss. Why is he evaluating his work? Why is he repairing his mess? If he makes a mistake merging records, it would be his fault.
He didn't understand anything. This. Is. Not. His. Job. He is an application developer. He shouldn't be babysitting the Awesome.
The right thing would be to say thanks for an optimization job and just wait. Make sure, every order has an written form. And Wait. For. The. Fun.
Admin
*raises hand * /Regional government, 1600 employees.
Admin
Sometimes it can be helpful to (anonymously, within earshot of a journalist or activist) mention that you're having problems finding something on the site that used to be there and which is required to be there by law…
I know exactly where the evil ideas thread is.
Admin
I call foul. Sorry, but these articles seem more and more like the local Agony Aunt - written by the editors themselves. I've been in many IT for 20-something years as a consultant and seen my fair share of idiots but really, a company with people as thick as this does not survive.
Fairy tales.
TDWFT used to be so good :(
Admin
Who said that it was a company, or that it survived?
Admin
Any approach that doesn't leave the boss up to his armpits in alligators along with everyone else will not teach the correct lesson.
(Note: this is a theoretical approach, never tried in production. :innocent:)
Admin
NASA and the European Space Agency seem to be able to do technical management, so it obviously isn't rocket science. Oh...
Admin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pN2of8Ct-o&list=PL565C42B8343143BD&index=38
Admin
Ah, the incompetent DBA and the competent Developer who is not allowed to help. Even though in my experience it's usually the other way around (though I may be biased), I fondly remember the days before separation of duty and compliance requirements, when developers and DBA worked together on databases...now god forbid that any dev should ever see production data or any DBA wants to be more than "that guy who can install databases and execute tested schema upgrade scripts provided by development".
Admin
At least we have a nice tidy list of TRWTF:
Have I missed any?
.
Admin
And compliance re: not torching or leaking (if applicable) the data is one thing -- but making it so that developers don't even have a sanitized or representative data set to develop with?! :wtf:
Also, what in the name of all things holy is this notion of "separation of duties requirements"?
While there are cases (PCI, HIPAA) where devs shouldn't see raw prod data, PCI compliance can be handled through a proper data sanitization process, for instance.Otherwise, why would you not give them read-only prod access?
The DBA job needs to be split in half in my mind:Also, which PHB came up with the notion that there shall only be one development environment/database per product?
Admin
We have database developers. It's a lot easier to get things done when you have a SQL developer writing the proc side of things and a web developer writing the API layer on top of it; the SQL guys know a lot more about database performance and tuning and query plans than any webdev wants to learn.
We also have operational DBAs. They're mysterious and nobody talks to them because we have a huge ops/dev canyon.
Admin
TRWTF is Dave not having a backbone and/or better explaining the problem when his boss brought up the DBA as a solution.
Admin
Management who like to give people nicknames.
Admin
We all know that there is competence and incompetence on both sides. The sole justification for management is that it should lubricate the wheels, remove cinders from the track, and keep the trains running smoothly on the great railway of progress. Too often said management is too busy charging for tickets and trying to head off irate customers to, you know, actually keep the trains running. Box ticking leads to situations that would never be tolerated in any branch of engineering.
Admin
Yeah, good luck finding an ITIL-locked silo-based organisation that will allow a developer anywhere near production environments. When any changes to QA and PROD means handing over complete deployment instructions to the ops-department through a change process, and you're not allowed to talk to the ops-people without a change system ticket and the DBAs classify as ops, developers just write their own damn sql. Based on the best guess as to what exists in production. It's blind luck that anything ever works in production.
I favor a devops-process myself, with a dba, application ops and developer(s) on the same team, working closely together to make the solutions better. I luckily recently went from an ITIL based project to an established devops team. Best move I ever made.
Admin
We had a fun one a while back - the app server was running out of space repeatedly during the nightly BI run - turned out SQL tracing had been switched on for one of the applications running on it earlier in the day to resolve some issue, and they'd forgotten to turn it off, so when the nightly job started it was spewing out SQL data logs at a high rate until the disk filled up and everything stopped working. Cue some frantic text messages to the DBA in the middle of the night along the lines of "please switch this off immediately!"
Admin
No good; if the relationship between the boss and "Awesome" is such that the former gave the latter that nickname, then it's probably the sort of relationship that the boss will decide is stronger than Dave's relationship with the "team".
Admin
Exactly. Chances are the boss is too blinded by "Awesome" to do anything. Look at any of the myriad of similar topics, the clueless idiot is always the "golden boy" of the organization, so nothing is going to get them removed or put in their place, and anyone who tries will be themselves fired for stirring the pot.
The whole "Its. Not. Your. Job" kind of crap just proves this is exactly that type of situation.
Admin
I personally blame this development on "certification". Managers are deeply impressed by someone who can show a Microsoft Excel certificate (*) or an Oracle DBA certificate. But that's all these people know. They know how to type "ALTER TABLE...", without an effing idea about how that fits in with the rest of the software. But managers don't care about that. Look! He has a certificate! Let's not upset the DBA. Problem solved.
(*) Microsoft Office Specialist: can open a 2nd spreadsheet without restarting the computer; Expert: can copy data between the two files; Master: knows how to add numbers in a column.
Admin
Knowledge and learning are for people without product certification.
Admin
I think it is more like this: some people have natural curiosity and can find things out for themselves. Going to a university can facilitate and develop this. As my crystallography supervisor said to us, "You may never use crystallography after you leave but you will have learnt a way of classifying something complex." Going to a trade school (which is what certifications are) will give exact knowledge to someone who has curiosity and so can build on it. But unfortunately it will also certify the person who simply wants a job paying $x per hour and doesn't want to learn anything beyond it.
It's not the certification so much as the people who just want to pass the test, and the people who want to collect their fees for doing the minimum tuition necessary.
Admin
You wrote three paragraphs to say part of what I managed in one short sentence. :stuck_out_tongue:
Admin
If this was about financial data instead, then I'd guess the company was MYOB Australia... Their fix for every slowness problem was always to simply hose your older data. If your data only went back 6 months, just burn your last quarter. It's not like you'd need that for taxes or customer returns or anything, right?
And now that they do "cloud" versions, I can just imagine them ditching customer's records just because it got slow.
Admin
And this is why programmers should never be allowed to write the user manuals.
Admin
I can blather when necessary. I save it for manuals, journal papers and books.
Admin
Besides, by not doing anything about it himself, the blame will inevitably flow to Awesome when people discover the missing records.
Admin
I can only bow in awe before your omnicompetence, modesty, and willingness to communicate with us helots.
Admin
You think Awesome won't claim that someone else deleted those records, along with a forged log if needed?
Admin
Admin
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