> Early in my career, I noticed a mindset among senior developers disparaging ORM's with "I'll write my own SQL, thanks." Hopefully they were justified in thei

> Early in my career, I noticed a mindset among senior developers disparaging ORM's with "I'll write my own SQL, thanks." Hopefully they were justified in their choice. Most senior developers I've worked with who started with this mindset, be it about an ORM, a framework, or some library that they did not understand or wanted to spend some time to learn, ended up just proving that these abstractions were not completely useless after all. How? By recreating their own vastly inferior and headache inducing implementations. I believe that there's an additional layer of skills between seniority and mastery. The former seems to be just about time and experience, whereas the latter adds a dimension of pragmatism and detachment. You become just a craftsman using tools with indifference to nimbly navigate complexity. You don't blame your tools, you just understand them, strengths and weaknesses. You know when to leverage them and when to ditch them.