> if you don't use an ORM, you'll invent one yourself Not true. You may use a graph database, or write SQL statements & apply functional transformations. Or yo

> if you don't use an ORM, you'll invent one yourself Not true. You may use a graph database, or write SQL statements & apply functional transformations. Or you might be using a platform like smalltalk & just save your image. There are other paradigms besides OOP & relational databases. > new hires will end up taking a ton of time to learn this "custom" orm framework of yours. Or your new hire might really know how to leverage the particular database you're using, but you force him to throw away a lot of his experience & to start over from scratch & instrument the database through an ORM layer. There are a lot of ORMs, their APIs may even differ, so someone who knows Propel still has to stop & read the docs if you're using Doctrine, for example. > it showed a true lack of knowledge of the ORM at hand and even SQL in general. Quite the opposite, anyone who can craft a query that complex obviously knows the tool well. Their real problem is knowing when to not use that tool. Or they just write bad code, regardless of what tool/langauge they're using, for whatever reason.