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Going on a decade ago, I worked with a DBA who would get angry and scream about things and often at me because I was one of the few willing to butt head’s with
by donatj 3y ago
Going on a decade ago, I worked with a DBA who would get angry and scream about things and often at me because I was one of the few willing to butt head’s with him. He would want to change something in the database schema and I would calmly explain how that wouldn’t work for the business logic it was representing. He’d go on to berate you and the data design.
He was very difficult to work with, but also inarguably one of the smartest people I have ever met. I learned so much from him that I still use today. We were even relatively friendly outside of work topics, talked about our mutual interest in minimalist music pretty often.
When he was let go for obvious reasons, I was the strangest combination of upset and relieved I have ever experienced.
- a_c 3y agoCurious to know how is he doing now
- donatj 3y agoLinkedIn has had him as retired for a bit, but he was a DBA for Wells Fargo for years after he left us.
- a_c 3y agoThanks for the reply. Was wondering how did future pan out for someone talented but hard to work with. Would they have a rather tumultuous career, or have their talent recognized hence very successful or even if they started their own
- greenthrow 3y agoThe brilliant jerk thing is, in my experience, largely a myth. If someone is highly intelligent, they will realize acting like a jerk is not helpful and causes them problems, and they will correct that behavior. People who persist in acting like a rude child beyond college, in my experience, get credited as brilliant because people are intimidated by their attitude. But if you look at their actual accomplishments and delivered value, it will be unimpressive.
- arethuza 3y ago"The brilliant jerk thing is, in my experience, largely a myth." Not in my experience - I've met a few spectacular examples in my career - but I am in my 50s.
- raverbashing 3y agoI think the "myth" part here is believing this person is a net gain in productivity When in practice some optimization or other gains that might be taken by his expertise are offset by just making everybody worse at their jobs
- ebiester 3y agoI feel like their prevalence in tech has decreased in the last 10 years in the places I've worked. They are not allowed to maintain their bad behavior from my experience, or they are drummed out of the organization relatively quickly before they get the opportunity to be indispensable. The "bitter old timer" doesn't happen as often anymore either, as people generally leave a job before they get too bitter due to the opportunities available.
- arethuza 3y agoThere may be something to that - I don't think I've met anyone like that in the last 15+ years. Mind you, I might have got better at picking better to people to work with.
- charlie0 3y agoThat's sad because the old timers generally have a lot of wisdom to share. They are usually also the ones at that stage in life where they are willing to mentor someone.
- civilitty 3y agoTheir prevalence has decreased because there are so many other engineers. For every person who was programming in the 1990s, there are at least a hundred that started in the 2010s and many of the former struck it rich and retired. Mentorship can't scale to those numbers.
- EspressoGPT 3y ago> I worked with a DBA How is it always the DBAs.
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- zabzonk 3y agotheir worries about not being much good at their job? the one time i tried to get one to look at our database design, the response was "it looks complicated". when compared with the back end for the trading system they were supposed to be supporting (but didn't), it was really simple.
- mathattack 3y agoThey’re the ones who have to catch all the nonsense dropped from above. They’re like offensive lineman - never get credit for success, only blame when something goes wrong.
- JohnFen 3y agoAt a previous job, I worked with such a person as well (not a DBA, though). Everyone tried to avoid working with him to the greatest degree possible -- except me. His emotions didn't bother me at all, and pretty quickly he came to like me exactly because I wasn't afraid of him and was always honest with him about my professional opinions. Eventually, though, I became his de facto "contact point", and everyone else who needed to interact with him would come to me and have me do it instead. That ended up being a huge downside.
- mdgrech23 3y agosounds like you're also hard to work with.
- donatj 3y agoI don't feel like I am. That said, I'm sure that's what a lot of people who are hard to work with would say. I'm opinionated and willing to stand up for what I believe is correct, but I'm soft spoken. I think the difference between the DBA and myself is that I am very open to other people's opinions and ideas. A fair number of my coworkers followed me here from a previous job. For a while, I was being a little harsh and short with people on code reviews. I could sense how people were reacting though and actively sought to be better. I worked with a friend who is a software mentorship advocate on how to better communicate effectively. As much as I hate the term, I think a little emotional intelligence and self reflection goes a long way.
- wccrawford 3y agoThat reminds me of a client we had at a previous job. He would constantly stress out the system far beyond what others did. At one point I heard "100x" thrown around. It let me fix major bottlenecks in our system long before it affected other customers, and we could just shut him off for a while (it was in his contract after a while) until I fixed the problem. I was a little sad when they finally banned him for good, but the rest of the company was rather relieved.
- will5421 3y agoToo smart for the job?
- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoIf I were a DBA, I'd yell a lot too. When the straw breaks the camel's back, the camel lands on the DBA.
- bob1029 3y agoThe combination of difficult + genius is a pretty standard deal. At a certain level of brilliance, it becomes challenging to communicate ideas, or more importantly, their implied value proposition to the business. Much of the time there is also some ego conflict on the team that evolves into a vicious cycle that requires superhuman reflection to unwind. For me, the best hackaround for friction is a demo. If I want to prove a controversial idea to the team, I build it first in my own time and then show it. Talking about and planning to do big scary things is 99% of the drama source in my life. Sometimes the demo goes off rails too, but it has a much better chance. After doing this for a while, I still believe the most potent off-hand mastery that a genius technologist could obtain is the sales pitch. Treating your team members just like your customers and hacking their brains into wanting what you propose is the ultimate skill - if you can pull it off. If you can't convince your team regarding your idea, it may not matter how brilliant it is. Dragging 10-20 horses to water is mostly infeasible for one person to accomplish without reaching for cartoon villain tactics (which would ultimately kill the whole business). I've done the sales pitch a few times. My go-to trick is to present 3-4 options, one of which is the option I want the team to really go with. The other options are framed in such a way that everyone feels super smart picking the one I wanted all along. Carefully-crafted options can move mountains.
- throwitaway222 3y agoSounds like a spectrum person.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y agoI've had a DBA refuse to do something for me, with me being a contractor and he being full timer. I remember I basically said "I've a dev, you're an admin your purpose in life is to implement what I build, given I have no access, so just fucking do it". I'd previously had someone talk smack to me on the phone when I needed something, so I hung up and went over to their desk and chewed them out loudly. This was the same place where one day after work I was at the pub with my workmates and I was profanely bad mouthing the head of IT as an incompetent boob (with just cause) and everyone was kicking me under the table trying to get me to shut up because his offsider was at the table listening. Two days later I look up to see him being marched past my desk and off the premises by security. He'd been fired. So maybe I was the bad person in that office, but these people just refused to do their job for no explicable reason. I remember everyone told me they've never heard anyone swear at work as much as I did, but they named a server after me after I left so they seemed to appreciate me.
- johnnyanmac 3y agoHope you took some personal reflection out of that instead of just concluding with "well I got my namesake at the job so that's nice". I don't got time to yell at people, I took an IC track for a reason. If I'm blocked, that's a lead's or manager's problem to solve or escalate. As a bonus, it leaves a paper trail that I don't need to lay out most of to begin with (just get it rolling).
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y agoI didn't yell at anyone who didn't yell at me first, I merely gave as good as I got. My manager didn't want to know about this sort of minor stuff, you don't go crying to them with every small thing they just get annoyed. They already know that these people are problematic, I wasn't the first person to have these problems. In every other job I did not have this experience. Everyone was fine and polite and did their jobs, and so was I. The above job was in a merchant bank in London and very high pressure, yet people were slack and useless. I just called them out on their behavior. I was never reprimanded for any of my behaviour. My manager's manager invited me to return when I left (I had to leave due to an illness in my family) because of my work. Some workplaces are just dysfunctional, like this one, the fact that the head of department was sacked gives you an idea. I was one of the few people who stood up to this culture and plowed through and fixed things. I sorted out several system breaking bugs while I was there, that has festered for years.