[mildavw]

Love this. What I've seen lately, as a contractor at several different companies, is inexperienced devs getting a very long way building apps without knowing what's going on with their database under the hood. That's a testament to the value of ORMS.

It's common, then, that the low hanging fruit for a contractor coming in to improve performance is to optimize queries and/or introduce triggers, views, and stored procedures. I've found that devs are scared of plain old SQL but the ones who know their ORM well can learn SQL easily with a little nudge and some guidance.