Can confirm from experience. It took me years to shake that off and become known as a developer who could database. Its a function of whatever the team lacks. Once upon a time, DBA was a thing - I did manage to stay out of that deep pigeonhole luckily.
From my limited interactions with DBA's.. they rarley did anything outside of the database other than tell the developers their queries were inefficient or deploy new tables/databases/upgrades.
I understand my view on the DBA may be limited, but are you serious ? Have I been unlucky and only ran into this weird subcategory ?
No, you experienced the average DBA which is probably someone that started as a Junior SysAdmin, futzed around with databases, liked that they could silo into that and do nothing else.
The problem is that that is basically where all advancement stopped for them. They learned SQL well enough, they might even know how to do transaction rollbacks, but god help you if you have a real systemic problem that takes detailed knowledge of the whole system to unwind and fix without major data loss.
I'm in the process of trying to convince management to hire a real Postgres expert(both inside and outside the database), because we are currently on a bad, checkbook driven path that is moving tons of our managed RDS Postgres databases to self-managed (and poorly architected) clusters on another cloud. I have neither the time nor the inclination to become a deep Postgres expert.
