[kragen]

My first tech job assignment required SQL. I didn't know it, didn't claim I knew it, got the job, read the O'Reilly book on SQL on the plane on my way to California. I learned about joins (although maybe not the JOIN keyword).

This was about the time MySQL came out, and years before Postgres added SQL support, so at the time your rather pathetic argument might have had merit, because there wasn't actually a way to get hands-on experience with SQL without a pricey license for proprietary software.

I still don't think it's reasonable to claim that you have "SQL experience" if you haven't touched joins. That's like saying you have JavaScript experience but don't know how to define a function.

Now, though, Skype and every browser embed SQLite. If you don't know enough SQL to do a join, it's because you lack intellectual curiosity. Don't blame your employer.

When I was hiring people, I wanted people who could do the job, not people who would lie that they could, then blame my company.

[anarazel]

> This was about the time MySQL came out, and years before Postgres added SQL support

Didn't those happen nearly at the same time? Postgres95 (which PostgreSQL started from) had support for some subset of SQL (including inner joins): https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=blob;f... outer joins were added a bit later: https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit...

[kragen]

I didn't realize Postgres already had SQL support in 1994! I didn't try to use it around that time; msql was a thing for a while, and then people moved to the protocol-compatible MySQL. I was using INFORMIX in that job (1996–7) and it wasn't for several more years that e.g. Slashdot switched to SQL backends.

So why didn't people use SQL in Postgres95? The licensing was fine. My best guess is that the SQL support wasn't yet good enough to be useful. The database as such (transactions, data types, persistence) was already pretty solid, as I understand it.

[st3v3r]

"If you don't know enough SQL to do a join, it's because you lack intellectual curiosity. "

Or other things have grabbed your interest. Are you saying that one lacks "intellectual curiosity" because they have had other priorities than learning this one specific technology?

[kragen]

If you're a programmer of any kind, sooner or later, you need to understand the relational data model and normalization. They're useful to you in every field of programming; they're one of those magic technologies that can frequently turn 200 lines of code into 10 lines, converting a day-long task into something so simple you can do it off-the-cuff. SQL is by far the most accessible way to use the relational data model, whatever the merits of Tutorial D and Prolog, and once you start normalizing your data, you need joins.

If we were talking about cuckoo hashing, 386 assembly, or FIR filter design, I would agree that it's "one specific technology" that someone could easily pass over with little loss in many programming fields. But not knowing how to do a join is more like not knowing how to open a file or use floating-point math: it's a crippling deficiency in your skills as a programmer, one that will slow you down in a wide variety of tasks.