4 ms·

I think for a lot of people, SQL is a skill that doesn't stick. You learn enough to do the queries you need for your project, they work then you forget about th

I think for a lot of people, SQL is a skill that doesn't stick. You learn enough to do the queries you need for your project, they work then you forget about them as you work on the rest of your project. These skills are perishable. Left outer join? Yeah, I knew what that was some time ago, but not anymore The days of dedicated SQL programers are mostly gone.

zabzonk 5y ago
> The days of dedicated SQL programers are mostly gone. I've never met a "dedicated SQL programmer" - all the C++ programmers I've worked with in the investment banking world were also expected to know, and did know, SQL pretty well - asking questions about it were normally part of the interview process.
simonw 5y ago
I started learning SQL twenty years ago and it's one of the only skills from the start of my career that has been consistently useful ever since.
nisegami 5y ago
I held this view before graduating and moving back to my 3rd world home country. For some reason, people here (the established ones with 5+ years of experience) see SQL as a general purpose programming language with which they do as much as possible.
slver 5y ago
We have a lot more clueless developers on average, which makes it seem like no one uses SQL anymore beyond basics. But we're still here, believe me. No one today is a dedicated X programmer, but doesn't mean we're all clueless about X.
andrewmcwatters 5y ago
Exactly. I own a software consultancy, and I tried explaining this to an engineering manager and he just didn't get it. For some reason, he couldn't understand that when you write SQL queries for a project, you typically do it once, and basically never again, with the exception of maybe adding or removing columns from the query. The "hard work," if you can call it that, is all in the joins. Then, I completely forget about it. You spend so much more time in development on everything else.
- darksaints 5y ago
  The engineering manager was right. SQL is the most pervasive programming language in existence. It doesn't get that way because nobody uses it. Maybe you don't use it much, but unless your consultancy specializes in some tiny niche where SQL isn't actually needed, you might want to rethink that. I've seen far too many projects where developers looked down on SQL as some sort of not-so-necessary evil, and they've all ended up reinventing it. Extremely poorly.

zabzonk 5y ago

> The days of dedicated SQL programers are mostly gone. I've never met a "dedicated SQL programmer" - all the C++ programmers I've worked with in the investment banking world were also expected to know, and did know, SQL pretty well - asking questions about it were normally part of the interview process.

simonw 5y ago

I started learning SQL twenty years ago and it's one of the only skills from the start of my career that has been consistently useful ever since.

nisegami 5y ago

I held this view before graduating and moving back to my 3rd world home country. For some reason, people here (the established ones with 5+ years of experience) see SQL as a general purpose programming language with which they do as much as possible.

slver 5y ago

We have a lot more clueless developers on average, which makes it seem like no one uses SQL anymore beyond basics. But we're still here, believe me. No one today is a dedicated X programmer, but doesn't mean we're all clueless about X.

andrewmcwatters 5y ago

Exactly. I own a software consultancy, and I tried explaining this to an engineering manager and he just didn't get it. For some reason, he couldn't understand that when you write SQL queries for a project, you typically do it once, and basically never again, with the exception of maybe adding or removing columns from the query. The "hard work," if you can call it that, is all in the joins. Then, I completely forget about it. You spend so much more time in development on everything else.

darksaints 5y ago
The engineering manager was right. SQL is the most pervasive programming language in existence. It doesn't get that way because nobody uses it. Maybe you don't use it much, but unless your consultancy specializes in some tiny niche where SQL isn't actually needed, you might want to rethink that. I've seen far too many projects where developers looked down on SQL as some sort of not-so-necessary evil, and they've all ended up reinventing it. Extremely poorly.