Database Developers Gone Bad

Some database developers, like many others in technical and engineering professions, like to do acrobatics. They like to show what they're capable of, and they want to impress. They frequently forgo simplicity and elegance to develop unnecessarily complicated systems that they think will make them look good.

To further complicate matters, many database developers are unqualified to begin with. The demand for database systems is out of control, and database development has become the career choice for many that are just plain unqualified. They're like surgeons who learn their trade in 3-day seminars. Worse, they’re like actors pretending to be surgeons. They give Golden Globe performances when interviewed by non-technical decision makers, they frequently attend meetings with VP-types, they are masters of the white board, and they often get big bonuses, promotions, and in the case of consultants, extended contracts. The only missing detail is that they don’t have a clue as to how to build a freaking production-quality database system.

Sadly, the users of these systems welcome them with enthusiastic masochism. They think they are are learning "technical" skills by working with cryptic naming conventions and wasting most of their time trying to sort out ridiculous data models. These users blame themselves for providing inconsistent and invalid query results to their clients. And then they beg for more.

This disease goes further up the food chain. Management "geniuses" (in quotes) think that they have something of great value if it takes a huge budget to develop it, a huge staff to maintain it, and nobody knows how the whole thing works. If by chance a competent developer should come along and build a simple, straightforward database system that costs less, is developed quickly, works transparently, and is easy to use, management think they are not getting their money's worth.

As if it wasn't enough that all this unnecessary complexity is embraced, but technical requirements that are actually necessary are frequently rejected. We are asked to justify requests for resources that are needed including time to write the damn code, while all the waste and spaghetti goes unquestioned. So weird!

The situation is far worse than any Dilbert cartoon. I have personally seen millions wasted developing absurdly convoluted and unsound systems when sensible and useful systems could have been developed at a fraction of the cost. The resulting database systems are unreliable, resource intensive, costly to maintain, and produce inconsistent results.

I haven’t read Superman comics since I was a kid, but Superman used to sometimes go to a planet called The Bizarro World. Everything on this planet was… well, bizarre. Things were the opposite of what one would expect. The planet was square instead of round. Tax collectors went around giving money to people instead of collecting it from them. People ate dinner in the morning and breakfast in the evening. Things were basically ass-backwards.

Now, as a mature adult, I have come to realize that I live on The Bizarro World. I guess I better wake up. Or is it fall asleep?

...