What personality characteristics do great DBAs share? What motivates them?
If you’re not sure why you should care, you’re probably not a hiring manager! Hiring and retaining highly skilled people is consistently listed as a top challenge for CIOs. CIOs strongly desire to predict whether someone’s a good fit for a particular role.
Enter the personality profile assessment. These are quantitative tools used by many companies to try to learn as much as possible about candidates during the recruiting process. I thought it would be interesting to know what drives DBAs, so I reached out to a number of great MySQL and PostgreSQL DBAs I know personally and asked them to fill out a pair of free online assessments.
These assessments rank behavioral tendencies in four dimensions, using the DISC model. They also rank motivators (values) in seven dimensions.
At this point I need to add a disclaimer that everything about this process is biased and unscientific. Everything from the selection of test subjects, to the interpretation of the results, is unscientific. Still, the results are interesting and I believe there are valuable lessons to be learned.
Let’s see what the results indicate.
DISC Model Behavioral Index
The DISC model ranks externally observable behaviors in categories of Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Compliance. These range from 0 to 100. Most people are strong in one or two categories and less dominant in others.
I combined the scores of all the respondents and built a heatmap from them. Here’s the result:
What can we draw from this? The typical DBA is relatively low in the D and I categories, and relatively high in S and C. It might also be useful to look at plots of individual points:
In this chart, the green line is the average score. DBAs tend to skew towards Steadiness and Compliance.
Values / Motivators
The behaviors are the “what” and the values or motivators are the “why.” The assessment I asked people to use ranked the following motivators: Aesthetic, Economic, Individualistic, Political, Altruistic, Regulatory, Theoretical.
Here’s the heatmap:
And here’s the individual scores and the average:
The results indicate that DBAs care a lot about theory, regulatory, and aesthetics; and they tend not to like politics or care much about money.
Conclusions
If you’re a hiring manager building a DBA team, you might be interested in how good DBAs tend to behave. You might like to know that they tend to be single-taskers who like structure and want to understand the ordering principles in their work and environment. You might also want to know that there are categories within which there’s a wide variation. For example, DBAs can be introverted, but not all of them are.
