For a potentially non-indicative view: I grew up in the modern software era, whatever that means to you (frameworks, kubernetes, 500mb react web apps) and have

For a potentially non-indicative view: I grew up in the modern software era, whatever that means to you (frameworks, kubernetes, 500mb react web apps) and have a lot of hiring authority myself and have a lot of cross functional experience, including SRE and working in an actual data center (so loud). imo DBA is useful at the extreme edges of performance after product market fit has been found and 90% of software has been written and it’s time to optimize. I wouldn’t personally hire a DBA before that as it would be premature optimization, especially considering “modern” approaches to profiling queries. I expect my entire team of SWEs to have profiled any DB queries and found low hanging fruits, and also lean towards fully managed database services like RDS. That being said, that’s a startup opinion. There are lots of F500s that will want them in their data centers. So like cobol programmers, I don’t think there will be a problem getting employment somewhere in the foreseeable future.