20 years of being a DBA on a single system is about fifteen years longer than you'd need to be an expert. I'm not sure why you're suggesting she might not be "a

20 years of being a DBA on a single system is about fifteen years longer than you'd need to be an expert. I'm not sure why you're suggesting she might not be "amazing" (your word, not OP's). This rhetoric is unhelpful. And I don't think your comparison fits. DBAs aren't software developers. They're analysts, operations, runtime support and debug. Their job is inherently long-term. There isn't the churn of frittering between framework-des-jours because migration is expensive. The complaint isn't that she might have to learn something new, it's the quality of work. It's not lazy or unrealistic to resist a transition from planned workloads to no-notice scrotwork without respect for your personal time. And even in software development, there are companies that respect their developers, even work hard at that to retain them. It's a skilled position where domain experience counts for a lot. More to the world than the Bay Area FAANGs and wannabes. Per every other comment, there are jobs for DBAs at all ends of the intensity spectrum.