An interesting debate from one of my editorials on risk. Some great points raised by everyone, but I still think that each person has to decide if they're taking  a risk or not and whether they want to do so.

The biggest risk for most people is in changing jobs. Changing is hard if you don't need to since you get out of your comfort zone, you're likely asking for more work as you get up to speed, you leave friends, etc. Changing when you lose a job is hard because you need to pay bills, and often you cut corners, taking chances with a new job you might otherwise refuse.

As a DBA, however, I think that you should be conservative, erring on that side. There are plenty of people that will take chances, developers, etc., often under pressure from management to get something done quicker. The DBA is the last line of defense in many cases to prevent the introduction of bad code into our database systems.