DBAs are often put in a difficult moral position in the course of doing their work because they have a uniquely privileged access to corporate data. The ridiculous stories that have recently been put about by security firms concerning the dishonesty of DBAs miss the point entirely. In twenty years of work in the database industry, I have never come across a corrupt DBA. Bad-tempered perhaps, eccentric, tedious, unhelpful maybe, but never dishonest. I’ve come across criminal behaviour in almost every other participant in the IT industry, but never in a DBA. It doesn’t seem to be part of a DBAs personality. A DBA is always better at observing and monitoring than participating. It is an important talent for a DBA
 
No, the problem for DBAs comes when they discover dishonesty and criminal activities in the company they work for.  This has happened to me several times. When you are designing and maintaining a financial system, you have to subject the financial transactions of the company to an intense scrutiny. It is a matter of self-preservation. When doing financial reporting, you have to crosscheck all the figures you provide, often with more zeal than the auditor. After you have your eye in, criminal activity is easy to spot, and alarmingly frequent. When it is a rogue individual, then the course of action is clear, but when the company itself is corrupt, the DBAs position is difficult indeed.

I could write a book about the criminal activity, and civil offences, I’ve come across in companies I’ve worked for in the course of my IT career. The trouble is that it would be cheerless and discouraging to read, as there is no easy, career-enhancing way out of the predicament in which the DBA finds himself. They were, with only one exception, painful and dreary experiences.

I once, long ago, got a job helping a company to configure a handheld PC for remote monitoring. The employers were pleasant, and paid both well and promptly. One might, perhaps, criticize the cut of their dark suits or their strange habit of wearing sunglasses in winter, indoors, but they seemed honest and straightforward. It was some time before I discovered that I was configuring these machines for remotely altering the behaviour of  ‘one-armed bandits’ (fruit machines). I never discovered what country these were used in. When I spoke reproachfully to the MD, he smiled disarmingly and said that of course the organisation did criminal things since they were a criminal organisation. He proudly told me that the device could milk a punter of his cash as smoothly as one could milk a cow. I’d always puzzled over why they referred to the portable device as a ‘milking machine’. Now I knew. Firstly, one let the gambler win over and over again until that psychological point at which the gambler felt his luck was in, and then one changed the odds to the exact setting that experience had told them that the average gambler would continue to put money into the machine despite losing. I’m told that this fiddling of the odds is all done automatically nowadays; alas the demise of manual labour.

He explained that, except for the obvious, and lucrative transgression, they were obliged to run their business with complete integrity, as they had to assume that they were under round-the-clock surveillance. They were never a day late with payments or filing their tax returns. They never knowingly committed any sort of offence. They were ‘squeaky’, he explained.

Fortunately I had, by then, completed my work. His honest answers to my questions rather floored me. Besides which, these guys had charm.

We parted on good terms.  I tried to feel tainted by my association with them but couldn’t. For many years afterwards we exchanged Christmas cards, but I have never been tempted to try my luck on any slot machine since that day.