Man hours versus clock hours
If I send one man to the site and it takes him 10 hours to do the job, I bill clock hours on his behalf. If I send two men to the site, I bill man hours. Here's why.
Both men expect to be paid for their hours. Both men SHOULD be paid for their hours.
Why did I send two men to the same location to do the same job? Could be a time restriction imposed by the client. It could also be that the work required two different skill sets- a hardware specialist and a network specialist, for instance.
That changes if I send the second man to learn from the first man and for no other reason. He may help out with the task at hand, may even do parts of it. But his purpose for being there is not driven by the customer.
What you're seeing is the disconnect in how people view different kinds of IT expertise.
A field engineer may be writing router tables on the fly (not fun) but is perceived to bring less to the table than a DBA. Because the perception of expertise is different, the perception of reasonable pay is different.
I wish I had a penny for all the times I was called out to fix something and was told by the client that "I'd have done it myself, but I don't have the time". Really? You would have known how to reconfigure your server? I KNOW how it got messed up to begin with! You decided to "fix" something!
A DBA is viewed differently. There is a greater degree of recognition that you have a skill set that the general public does not have.
Most of us at one time or another has fixed a small household appliance or addressed a minor plumbing problem without calling in the experts. Because the computer is so ubiquitous, people are inclined to think that they can fix that too.
I don't care if your hardware/network guys didn't charge a dime- your clients would still complain. That isn't the tech's fault. It is the client's myopia.
Edit- missed a few letters.
