[Tade0]

A couple of years ago I had an opportunity to fill a fullstack role for the first time in several years.

First thing I noticed was that I couldn't roll an SQL statement by hand even though I had a distinct memory of being able to do so in the past.

I went with an ORM and eventually regretted it because it caused insurmountable performance issues.

And that, to me, is the definition of a senior engineer: someone who realised that they've already forgotten some things and that their pool of knowledge is limited.

[mattmanser]

ORMs are absolutely fantastic at getting rid of the need for CRUD queries and then boilerplate code for translating a result set to a POCO and vide versa. They also allow you to essentially have a strongly typed database definition. It allows you to trivialise db migrations and versioning, though you must learn the idiosyncrasies.

What they are not for is crafting high performance query code.

It literally cannot result in insurmountable performance issues if you use it for CRUD. It's impossible because the resulting SQL is virtually identical to what you'd write natively.

If you try to create complex queries with ORMs then yes, you're in for a world of hurt and only have yourself to blame.

I don't really understand people who still write basic INSERT statements. To me, it's a complete waste of time and money. And why would you write such basic, fiddly, code yourself? It's a nightmare to maintain that sort of code too whenever you add more properties.

[FridgeSeal]

Plenty of tools out here doing plain sql migrations with zero issues.

At my day job everyone gave up on attempting to use the awkward ORM dsl to do migrations and just writes the sql. It’s easier, and faster, and about a dozen times clearer.

> I don't really understand people who still write basic INSERT statements

Because it’s literally 1 minute, and it’s refreshingly simple. It’s like a little treat! An after dinner mint!

I jest, I’m not out here hand rolling all my stuff. I do often have semi-involved table designs that uphold quite a few constraints and “plain inserts” aren’t super common. Doing it in sql is only marginally more complex than the plain-inserts, but doing them with the ORM was nightmarish.

[ethbr1]

> It’s like a little treat! An after dinner mint!

You completely changed my perspective on simple SQL housekeeping. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qYPW3O6VhXo&t=48s

[ethbr1]

My definition of a senior engineer is someone who can think of most of the ways to do a thing... and has the wisdom to chose the best one, given the specific situation’s constraints.

[listenallyall]

Perhaps because databases were fundamental to the first programs I ever built (in the ancient 19xx's), but damn, I cannot believe how many so-called experienced devs - often with big titles and bigger salaries - cannot write SQL. It's honestly quite shocking to me. No offense, but wow.

[Tade0]

Thing is, this used to be trivial to me, but I spent several years in a purely frontend role, so didn't interact directly with databases at all.

Moreover, the market promotes specialization. The other day I had a conversation with a friend who is rather a generalist and we contrasted his career opportunities with those of a person I know who started out as a civil engineer, but went into IT and over the course of about four years specialized so heavily in Angular, and only that, that now makes more than the two of us combined.

He can't write an SQL statement - I'm not sure he was ever introduced to the concept. How does that feel?