I don't think it's as elaborate as you're saying -- the clearest road into a productive job for many years has been "join a fast growing tech company who uses <

I don't think it's as elaborate as you're saying -- the clearest road into a productive job for many years has been "join a fast growing tech company who uses <cool_framework> to do the magic, so the tech team is always building more business logic". When you've been working with (eg:) ActiveRecord and Ruby on your database data, direct SQL just doesn't come up until you're trying to wrangle more efficiency in your queries or do more complicated joins. It certainly makes sense for all developers to learn more SQL! But it just hasn't been part of the daily work requirement for many. As for the attraction of noSQL databases, I think perhaps it's more of a new-hotness trend rather than a serious technical decision. NoSQL has its place, but like most of this kind of tooling, it's often applied incorrectly because of a lack of thinking through the business logic.