Comment by cultofmetatron

Same here, mostly because I avoid it because I really do not like writing queries. Something about the syntax rubs me the wrong way, especially if I have to switch from MySQL/Postgres/MSSQL regularly. I'll use an ORM whenever I can, if performances do not matter.

Maybe this makes me a grumpy old man, but I feel like if you're primary role is to write software which interacts with a SQL database you should understand how to interact directly with that database. Not because you're going to do it frequently, but because understanding the thing your ORM is abstracting away for you allows you to more intelligently use those abstractions without making whoever runs the underlying database cry.

I guess this is my first old-senior moment, but even if you use an ORM then you should know basic SQL. That table structure will be the most long-living thing in your system and probably outlive the ORMs and a bad table structure is going to create a mess later on.

All projects I worked with, that used ORM, were burning pile of shit and ORM was a big part of this. I hate ORM and would prefer SQL any day. In my projects I almost never choose ORM.

I trust that some people can deal with ORM, but I know that I can't and I didn't see anyone who can do it properly.

So, I guess, there are some radical views on this issue. I wouldn't want to work with person who prefers to use ORM and avoids know SQL, and they probably hold similar opinion.

It is really weird to me that someone would call SQL low level. SQL is the highest level language available in the industry, definitely level above ordinary programming languages.

I would assume he means creating a foreign key relationship from the posts and users table. Doesn't rails or prisma have a SQL migration tool? (Upon looking it looks like it's Active Record)

So the equivalent of

`rails db:migrate` after doing what you suggested in the interview. You could write in SQL as..

``` ALTER TABLE posts ADD COLUMN user_id INT, ADD CONSTRAINT fk_user FOREIGN KEY (user_id) REFERENCES users(id); ```

I don't know if that's what he was after but that's what my mind jumped to immediately. I'd recommend learning a bit as sometimes I've found that orms can be a lot slower than writing plain SQL for some more complex data fetching.

One thing is reversing a linked list during a white board interview. Another write a simple JOIN between two tables.

Come on guys, working on backend applications and not having a clue about writing simple SQL statements, even for extracting some data from a database feels...awkward

Wait, people still unironically use ORMs instead of writing queries directly? Not surprising then that everything works like shit

> most new hires would have no idea how to write a SQL query.

probably why people think rails is slow. our integration partners and our customers are constantly amazed by how fast and efficient our system is. The secret is I know how to write a damn query. you can push a lot of logic that would otherwise be done in the api layer into a query. if done properly with the right indexes, its going to be WAY faster than pulling the data into the api server and doing clumsy data transformations there.

I learned it ~15 years ago, and when I use it a lot it sticks with my pretty well. But if I go a month or two without writing raw queries I lose anything more advanced than select/update/delete/join. I think I forget it faster than other things because none of syntax/semantics aren't shared with anything else I use.

It's a wide field so it depends on the specialization. I did computer engineering 15+ years ago and we never touched SQL, but I think the software engineering people did have a class on it.

Sorry to be harsh but that just sounds ignorant. LLM can be a great tool to speed up your learning process especially for devs. It can help me get over blocks that used to take me half a day of digging through docs and codes.

Being able to memorise things that are easily looked up (like syntax) doesn’t demonstrate deep knowledge. It’s a bad interview question.

Ask most folks about the code generated by the compiler or interpreter and you’ll get blank stares. Even game devs now barely know assembly, much less efficient assembly.

There is still a place for someone who is going to rewrite your inner-loops with hand-tuned assembly, but most coding is about delivering on functional requirement. And using tools to do this, AI or not, tend to be the prudent path in many if not most cases.

I’ve written huge queries and CTE’s in my career. But I haven’t done it recently. Personally, I’d need 10 minutes of google time to refresh my memory before being able to write much sql on paper, even with bad syntax. It doesn’t mean I’m a bad engineer because I don’t bother to memorise stuff that’s easily googleable.

And then later, when you couldn’t read your own handwriting, you said, “This damn thing is illegible— so it’s probably valid Perl.”