[markkanof]

You seem to be calling out Hibernate as the problem, but really the problem is the developers that either don't understand or refuse to interact with a major component of their application (the SQL database). A good ORM will make CRUD actions quick to implement and will get out of the way when more complex queries are needed.

[bottompair]

True. Hibernate isn't really the issue - more the existence of Hibernate sometimes creating lazy engineering. I guess I'm old school - my preference (even with simple CRUD) is to build the queries myself if nothing else to avoid object models in code being translated into often flawed data schema by the ORM (if you happen to let your ORM create database objects for you).

Even with simple CRUD I've had to unwind faulty implementations where a smallish (50GB) database was being eager fetched into memory because of poor ORM config and overuse of FK relationships - when a user did something as simple as logging into the app.

And I'm not talking junior developers - some of these guys were 10+ years at Amazon.

[BigTuna]

I've been rattling my cage about this problem for a few years now. There's room and need for an "ORM/DBA" position in our industry. Most of the common production packages are both complex and flawed enough to justify a full time position, and yet I've seen so many companies lose hours of productivity floor-wide because the dev group's [N]Hibernate knowledge has been pressed beyond its limits.