Are you cursed with a manager that doesn't understand technology or even your job? I think that lots of technical people feel this way, whether it's justified or not. It can make for some rocky relationships.
I think about half of my managers over the years have been technically saavy, and half have been just managers. I've worked for sales guys, finance guys, and one guy that I'm not even sure what he might have done other than be a manager. Of the technical ones, most of them were people I thought were knowledgeable about technology, but sometimes out of touch. It might have been years since they had worked with the computers we were working with, which meant they often didn't remember how things worked.
Or they might never have spent any time with the technology we was using, and didn't really understand how it might apply.
Many times I've worked as DBA and my job hasn't been understood, even when I had a technical manager. I had one guy that could write .NET code in the early 2000s and even he wasn't exactly sure how the database worked. He called one night when he and some programmers were in the office and the database RAID array crashed. I tried to talk him (and a few others) through the restoration process, but they didn't really understand why we had to restore a full backup and then log backups. Fortunately I was driving back from some event and could stop by the office to get things working again.
It seems that very few people, and thus managers, ever work deeply with relational databases. Often people are peripherally aware of how they work, that they're these large conglomerations of spreadsheet like constructs that store data. And they magically work quicker with sets of data than individual records of data.
Explaining what is happening in a SQL Server is cumbersome, and even with technical managers, I think a DBA needs to be able to slightly "dumb down" the process and information. Tell them only what they need to know, but in a way that they can understand. It can get frustrating and annoying for highly skilled DBAs, but it's definitely a skill that successful DBAs have.
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
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Today's podcast features music by Everyday Jones. No relation, but I stumbled on to them and really like the music. Support this great duo at www.everydayjones.com.
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