Read an interesting book recently, ‘Outliers – the story of success’ by Malcolm Gladwell.

There’s a good synopsis of the book here on wikipedia.

I don’t want to write in detailed review of the book, but it’s well worth a read. There were a couple of sections which I thought were possibly relevant to IT professionals and DBAs in particular.

Firstly, ‘the 10,000 hour rule’, in this section Gladwell asserts that to be a real ‘elite performer’ takes 10,000 hours of practice.

‘Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good, it’s the thing you do that makes you good’.  He gives many interesting examples – the Beatles, Bill Gates etc – but I was wondering could this be applied to DBAs ?

If it takes 10,000 hours to be a really elite DBA – how long does that really take ? 8 hours a day makes 1250 days. If we assume that most DBAs work around 230 days a year – then it takes around 5 and a half years to become an elite DBA.  

But how much time per day does a DBA spend actually doing DBA work ? Certainly it’s my experience that the more experienced I get as a DBA, the less time I seem to spend actually doing DBA work – ie meetings, change-control meetings, project planning, liasing with other teams, appraisals etc.  Is it more accurate to assume that a DBA spends half their time actually doing ‘real’ DBA work – or is that just my bad luck ?  

So, in reality, I’d argue it can take at least 5 1/2 and more likely closer to 10 years to become an elite DBA. Why do I keep receiving CVs for senior DBAs with 2-4 years actual DBA experience ?

In the second section I found particularly interesting, Gladwell writes about analysis of plane crashes and the importance of in-cockpit communications. He describes a couple of crashes involving Korean Airlines – where co-pilots were often deferrential to pilots, and unwilling to openly criticise their more senior colleagues or point out errors when things were going badly wrong…

There’s a better summary of Gladwell’s concepts on mitigation  here – but to apply this to a DBA role… If you are a DBA and you do not agree with  a decision of one of your superiors, then it’s your duty as a DBA to say what you think is wrong, before it’s too late… 

Obviously there’s a fine line between constructive criticism and moaning, but a good senior DBA or manager should be able to take well-researched criticism\debate from a more junior DBA.   Is this really possible ?