I have been wondering about the future of the plain vanilla DBA. I remember back when DBA jobs would appear that had a bunch of extreme skill requirements attached to them. Those seem to be the norm now. I changed jobs from DBA to the nebulous title of Systems Integrator. This translates to "run the databases and hardware but make all the apps for them too." Fewer and fewer of my friends seem to be just running DBs. Are we going to a future where (in small to medium organizations at least) there are just "tech guys" who do it all from hardware up through transactional web front-ends? I haven't decided if I should burrow deeper into straight database work or keep up this diversification.