I’m fed up with reading a lot of articles on various technical websites which are aiming to teach the world how to do various things related to programming! And that sounds strange I know, because we need those articles, we need more people to share their knowledge this way. But I’m fed up because I found out more and more these articles are written by people with very little experience (which is why probably a lot of them are positioned as “entry level”) – to the point where it’s probably only about 10 – 20% of the new articles appearing nowadays actually have any value.

One of the many giveaways about the level of knowledge and contact with the real world of the writer is when they start talking about “your company DBA’s should be able to sort out optimizing the database” or “your company sysadmin team can set this up for you” etc.

Well, I don’t know about you, but in 80% of the cases I have found out that I’m the DBA, the sysadmin, the architect and the developer – and that’s not because of the size of the companies I work with. I have worked in my time with some UK telecommunication giants and I can tell you that their DBA team were only responsible for monitoring their Oracle instances, making sure they are running fine, backing them up and planning the disaster/recovery of the systems. And if you actually walked to them and asked for some help in setting up the database and maybe optimizing index types you will get just a shrugg and you’d be told that’s not a DBA issue and that they don’t deal with that and in fact don’t know how to. Same with the sysadmin: most companies have these guys responsible for securing firewalls and access to systems but ask them to help you set up a subversion instance or CVS and they’ll just look at you weird – though only for a second and then turn back to their screen.(In fact once you set it up yourself and go back to them to ask them to secure access to it you’re gonna be told to send an email with detailed instructions on how to do so – which reads pretty much “do it yourself except that i’ll do the typing“.)

The list doesn’t stop at just DBA’s and sysadmin’s – there are many other areas a developer finds himself covering as it is simply in the nature of the job. Failure to accept that IS the case is just a simple naivety from someone and denote total lack of experience (not to mention versatility!). I appreciate that there are some companies that will have DBA’s etc to support developers – but these are such a small minority!I would venture to guess its less than 5% of the cases – and if one of these bloody writers only worked with 1 of these companies and never experienced any other setup it just proves my point of lack of experience. And if you haven’t got the experience, how can you share some “success stories” and preach the fucking world?

Guys, get a fucking grip and take your head out of your fucking arse and look around – and then take that pen you used for writing your article and shove back where your head came out of and sit on it so to speak for a while – who knows, in the end you might decide got to write anymore and “teach the world” – thank fuck!