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Jan 08Behavioral Deficiencies
by in Feature Articles on 2008-02-28
Shawn O. was not used to bright lights, smiling faces, or greetings like “hi Shawn, how are you today?” In fact, just about anything that wasn’t specifically intended to bring pain and misery to all had become foreign to him. It was simply par for the course. Shawn, after all, was an Oracle DBA. And not just any Oracle DBA, but one who sat on the company’s Database Code Review Council.
Like at many other Oracle shops, the Council at Shawn’s company was responsible for defining policies and procedures to make it virtually impossible for any developer within the company to make changes to their databases. For example, if a developer wanted to change, say, the columns retrieved from a single SELECT statement, he’d have to fill out a ream of paperwork, venture all the way up to the top floor, find his way to The Council’s chambers, humbly plead his case to The Council’s members – each of whom would be ensconced in darkness, wearing their traditional Oracle DBA robe – and then repeat the process several times after The Council ridicules him for missing paperwork, too little whitespace, too much whitespace, etc., and rejects his request for change. It’s just the way things work.
Anton N is not a programmer by trade. Whenever he comes across “questionable” code in his job as an engineer, he always gives the programmer the benefit of the doubt: it might just have to be that complicated to work; maybe he did it to work around some system limitation; or perhaps it’s some optimized routine. It’s only fair. Certainly, he wouldn't want some programmer critiquing his decision to use the modial interaction of magneto-reluctance (rather than a more efficient method, such as capacitive directance) for supplying inverse reactive current in a unilateral phase detractor. 
"Hey, Marcin, do you have a second to talk? Come meet me at my office. No big deal, just when you have a sec." Marcin spun around in his chair, stood up, and walked to his boss's office.
Business was booming. Smartypants Software was selling licenses for their fancy new web portal software about as fast as they could generate license keys. Developers were working later and later into the night, and the tech support staff could hardly catch their breath between calls.
Every so often, Bob B. observed that his company's e-commerce site would crash-hard. No one had any clue as to why it happened, but everyone knew how to fix it. Restart both the IIS and SQL Server processes and, voilà, within a minute, the site was up and running again.