So, I was having a conversation with someone via Twitter yesterday that started with me getting on a high horse about chargeback – or rather, insisting that if a corporate backup strategy involved chargeback, it was wrong.
That’s something I’ll blog about here later, but it led to another discussion, which effectively came down to that fear that many people in IT, and in fact, business overall, seem to have towards DBAs.
The fear is sometimes so much that it’s a wonder cubicle maps don’t look something like this:
As a consultant, I’ve gone to many environments – and in my previous work as a system administrator, I dealt with a variety of situations, and in my time I’ve come across my fair share of database administrators.
As I mentioned in my book, DBAs have a duty of care towards the databases they’re responsible for, and it’s fair to say that in 99.99% of cases the DBAs that I’ve encountered have been passionately cognisant of that duty of care, and have taken it very, very seriously.
But it’s time to call a spade a spade, and also acknowledge that maybe up to half of the time, the DBAs at sites are viewed with fear, as if there’s a dragon walking around the hallway. There’s some common stereotypes: volatile tempers, intransigence, inflexibility and, well, blunt. In actual fact, there are people of this personality type regularly scattered across all of IT, regardless of business function, but for some reason, we seem to notice it most in DBAs. (Maybe that’s because they tend to also be so highly passionate about what they do.)
So why do people get away with that kind of volatile behaviour? Because the business lets them be that way.
This is a classic management problem, but it ends up reflecting poorly on IT. I think this partly stems from the origin of most IT managers. Particularly at the team leader level, and their immediate superiors, management have been pushed up out of technical roles into management roles. In most businesses, this happens because of a few key reasons:
- the person is technically competent enough to mentor new staff
- the person is able to be organised
- the person is able to get along with colleagues
Those qualities alone don’t make someone a manager. Managers also have to deal with conflict resolution, and people who have come up from a purely technical role in IT into management because of those qualities won’t necessarily have conflict resolution skills.
If you have staff on site who either have anger management issues, or are strongly confrontational, but management who aren’t equipped to work in conflict resolution, you have a problem brewing that will be obvious to anyone who walks onto your site. If you have to, at the end of a meeting, pull someone aside and apologise for the behaviour of someone else at the meeting, then it’s obvious there’s a problem that needs to be solved.
It’s time we start taming dragons in IT. Of course, this isn’t just about DBAs – that was just a way of kick starting this discussion. I’ve equally seen people with those personality traits in storage, in virtualisation, in backup, in email, in general system administration. We all have. If you’re still reading this, there’s a high degree that you’re not one of those people, by the way. (If you are one of those people, you’re likely either already deleting this blog from your bookmarks, or penning a strongly worded comment!)
No business should be ‘afraid’ of its staff; furthermore, everyone should remember the old adage:
If you want to know how irreplaceable you are, stick your finger in a glass of water and measure the size of the hole that you leave behind.
Just because someone is good at what they do shouldn’t excuse poor behaviour. I’ve seen environments where that happens – most notably at stockbroking companies. In those companies, the traders who are making good money for the company get away with almost anything. One stockbroking firm I used to work for maintained detailed logs of people who downloaded pornography at work. At the start of 2000, some traders were downloading over 1GB a month of porn, at work, and not getting punished. Why? Because they made the company money. Anyone who made that list who wasn’t a trader though … heaven help them. It was hypocrisy exemplified.
Poor behaviour is poor behaviour – and just because someone is damn good at what they do, or someone works on something that is damn important to the company doesn’t mean they should be allowed to run rough-shod over other staff.
The problem when you have dragons in the environment is that they’re usually highly resistant to change. There may be very valid business reasons on why something should be done, but if the dragon (sometimes literally ROARS) “NO!”, then everyone pales back and whispers “OK, please don’t eat us!” and lets the dragon go back to sleep. And while the dragon sleep, the business atrophies.
It’s time we start tearing up all those cubicle maps that have “Here be dragons!” on them, regardless of what job the dragon does.