This is a good caveat, and I agree with the thrust of your point. Especially about stored procedures. Sometimes DBAs, especially corporate oldschool ones, can

This is a good caveat, and I agree with the thrust of your point. Especially about stored procedures. Sometimes DBAs, especially corporate oldschool ones, can really propose DBA-only solutions, and it's painful. I think another way of thinking about this is hire "former DBAs." Most of the developers I know who had really solid SQL, the greybeards I learned from, were either former DBAs or former sysadmins who had become full-stack developers. edit: Another was a junior developer who interned two years as a DBA role. He was desperate to lose the DBA title, and I always respected that, but damn if his SQL wasn't better than mine.