8 ms·

I recently caught out someone trying to hide their deep knowledge of Postgres when, in a moment of weakness as I mentioned one of the benefits of TOAST, he repl

I recently caught out someone trying to hide their deep knowledge of Postgres when, in a moment of weakness as I mentioned one of the benefits of TOAST, he replied "I guess that's why they call it 'the best thing since sliced bread'". And that's when I knew. Because that's an exact quote from the docs. > This section provides an overview of TOAST (The Oversized-Attribute Storage Technique). > PostgreSQL uses a fixed page size (commonly 8 kB), and does not allow tuples to span multiple pages. Therefore, it is not possible to store very large field values directly. To overcome this limitation, large field values are compressed and/or broken up into multiple physical rows. This happens transparently to the user, with only small impact on most of the backend code. The technique is affectionately known as TOAST (or “the best thing since sliced bread”). The TOAST infrastructure is also used to improve handling of large data values in-memory. https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/storage-toast.html https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/storage-toast.html

saurik 5y ago
Why would anyone try to "hide their deep knowledge of Postgres"? Like, I could easily see someone having to hide their deep knowledge of MongoDB--lest they be branded forever as "damaged"--but I've been under the impression that PostgreSQL skills are considered a really good thing this past decade or so... were they just really hoping to avoid becoming a database engineer, or were they maybe under threat of becoming an "on call" asset?
- kamilm 5y ago
  > Why would anyone try to "hide their deep knowledge of Postgres"? > or were they maybe under threat of becoming an "on call" asset? This is likely, especially if the person they're talking to tends to leech on other people's skills & time.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mmcgaha 5y ago
  Sometimes it is better to be the student than the teacher.
- brimble 5y ago
  If you're specializing in something else but have knowledge of some other, unrelated thing, the latter is often at least accidentally concealed because it rarely comes up. Further, one might deliberately conceal it, to avoid having work assigned that distracts from the thing one is trying to focus on (for career development, personal preference, whatever reason). I've been known to pretend not to know a damn thing about WordPress, for instance. Even though I do.
- striking 5y ago
  > were they maybe under threat of becoming an "on call" asset You got it. A previous role as a database firefighter was something this individual did not want to continue at their new workplace.
  - dvtrn 5y ago
    I’ve definitely done it for exactly this reason, and others mentioned in the thread: a strong desire to not suddenly become the ______ guy. Additional responsibility with no additional authority absolutely sucks when you get (a) pigeonholed, (b) saddled with every single request ever about _______ in addition to your other work or (c) some unholy combination of both. Especially when ______ only has enough “buy in” from decision makers to make the decision that you need to keep ______ alive because the business “needs”it but apparently not enough to properly source and acquire the necessary resources it needs compared to other business initiatives. Because “why do we need to do that? I thought you knew about ______ “ Go figure. I’m quite done volunteering myself like that.
    - kelnos 5y ago
      Heartily agreed. Additional responsibility without the authority to match just sets you up for failure. And rarely do you get extra pay for this additional responsibility anyway.
- popularonion 5y ago
  If people ever start seeing you as “the database guy”, you’ll be pigeonholed into that slot as long as you remain in that team. Or maybe their manager was just a really big fan of Oracle or something. I don’t know.
  - vjust 5y ago
    Can confirm from experience. It took me years to shake that off and become known as a developer who could database. Its a function of whatever the team lacks. Once upon a time, DBA was a thing - I did manage to stay out of that deep pigeonhole luckily.
    - bifrost 5y ago
      DBA is absolutely still a thing, they fix things that developers make that deal with databases :)
      - worthless-trash 5y ago
        From my limited interactions with DBA's.. they rarley did anything outside of the database other than tell the developers their queries were inefficient or deploy new tables/databases/upgrades. I understand my view on the DBA may be limited, but are you serious ? Have I been unlucky and only ran into this weird subcategory ?
        InvaderFizz 5y ago
        No, you experienced the average DBA which is probably someone that started as a Junior SysAdmin, futzed around with databases, liked that they could silo into that and do nothing else. The problem is that that is basically where all advancement stopped for them. They learned SQL well enough, they might even know how to do transaction rollbacks, but god help you if you have a real systemic problem that takes detailed knowledge of the whole system to unwind and fix without major data loss. I'm in the process of trying to convince management to hire a real Postgres expert(both inside and outside the database), because we are currently on a bad, checkbook driven path that is moving tons of our managed RDS Postgres databases to self-managed (and poorly architected) clusters on another cloud. I have neither the time nor the inclination to become a deep Postgres expert.
- JohnHaugeland 5y ago
  "Oh, you're a computer programmer? Can you help me with my printer?" But difficult, and with consequences.
  - arunnanda 5y ago
    Printers can be harder, especially if you have driver trouble.
    - 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
      "Oh, you're a hacker? Can you help me with my printer?" I once extracted a PPD from a very expensive printer's firmware because the vendor didn't officially support Linux.
    - pcthrowaway 5y ago
      We could never get the damn things working in our office This was when I worked for HP
      - mark-r 5y ago
        I once fixed a bug caused by a faulty printer driver from HP. The driver changed the floating point control word and didn't change it back. Our program crashed while doing a completely innocuous operation, but only if you had printed to an HP printer earlier in the session.
        mikestew 5y ago
        I remember that, because I worked on the MS FoxPro team at the time and report printing was crashing for a lot of users, but not all of them. Took forever to finally pin it down because, as parent comment points out, the culprit could have long left the building by the time the crash happens. Stupid driver sets the FPU to say "math errors like divide-by-zero are software's problem now, not mine" without telling software. IIRC (and this was over 20 years ago), operations had to be wrapped in/with the one line of code that flipped it back. But here's the thing: it wasn't just HP, it was a lot of print drivers. I suspected that there was some printer driver boilerplate out there, possibly even published by MS, that included this bug. (And, wow, did I swerve sharply into the off-topic lane for story time. Sorry.)
- sam0x17 5y ago
  Though it's rare these days, there is still such a thing as being modest
- evilduck 5y ago
  A few other scenarios: In an interview I don’t want to be intimidating and feigning ignorance can give the candidate opportunity to shine. If they go deep, I can keep up and keep pushing, if they veer into bullshitting I can tell and gracefully conclude without offending anyone. As a manager, not disclosing depth lets me ask stupid questions more frequently and in more contexts (for the benefit of others, for when I forget something or don’t understand something, as a Socratic teaching method, to help set the culture of asking questions, etc) Playing dumb is also a good way to avoid responsibility if you hate something, too, if a bit passive aggressive.
- hinkley 5y ago
  Similarly I know a lot about software management because I saw that it affects everything I do, and I needed to be able to push back on bad management. Doesn't mean I want to be a project manager. No, I don't, and please stop asking. And there are tasks you took on at old jobs because they needed to get done and nobody else would do it, so you got stuck. You did them. Maybe you even did them well. But they aren't on your resume, because you don't want to do it again. And if you mention them as anecdotes, you are careful where and when you bring them up.
- mdellavo 5y ago
  Why would some be branded damaged because they have knowledge of a tool? That's ludicrous. I've used many databases including mongo. They are all tools like any other with pros and cons and having experience with multiple across domains is a boon.
  - recursive 5y ago
    It may be ludicrous, but it's not an uncommon point of view. "... teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery" - Edsger W. Dijkstra https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD898.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/E...
- pharrington 5y ago
  The competitive fighting game scene's term for this is "Hiding your power level".
- kumarvvr 5y ago
  In my home, I would want to be the dumb guy whose only knowledge of computers is to turn on the button. In my work, I would want to be the know it all, so that I can jump between good projects. In my consultation business I would want to be the master in the topic I work with. Depends on the context.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Sometimes being seen as deeply knowledgeable will do nothing but create endless unpaid work for you. It is often the case that this work comes from people who don't know and don't want to know whatever it is you're good at. Surely everyone here can relate with the classic "computer guy" everyone takes advantage of. It turns out this exact same thing can happen in actual technology companies. All you have to do to become "that guy" is have knowledge about some vital technology that people don't actually want to care about. People will happily send anything related to it directly your way, increasing your workload and responsibilities with zero additional compensation. It seems databases are to many professionals what computers are to laymen. They depend on this technology but they don't fully understand how it works or how to fix problems. They still want to define the database schema and make other key decisions. If there's any problem, they don't want the responsibility, they want to be able to offload it to some "database guy". Who wants to be that guy?
bryanrasmussen 5y ago
ok, but Toast being the best thing since sliced bread is also a somewhat antiquated vernacular expression, I mean obviously the best thing since sliced bread is often used without toast as the thing being referred to but it was also often the case that toast was being referred to> https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/02/how-the-phrase-the-best-thing-since-sliced-bread-originated/252674/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/02/how-the-p...
- glouwbug 5y ago
  Yeah, maybe the guy just has a sense of humor - something that your average software developer would mistake for being a reference to documentation
  - gowld 5y ago
    This is wholly unnecessary.
    - Izkata 5y ago
      What's unnecessary, a sense of humor? ;)
- gowld 5y ago
  Toast predates machine-sliced bread, which is what "sliced bread" refers to. Sliced bread made toast better (easier to automate), but that doesn't make toast the best thing since sliced bread. The article you linked explains that "sliced bread" is the best thing, to which all later (not just bready) inventions are compared.
  - giaour 5y ago
    Isn't the joke that the particular piece of toast always postdates the particular slice of bread it was made from? I.e., toast is the best thing since sliced bread because first we had sliced bread, and then we toasted it. It's a dumb dad joke
  - 5y ago
swsieber 5y ago
I am not familiar with Postgreql. I would make that joke.
reidjs 5y ago
I'm a little bit confused by the wording "This happens transparently to the user," I assume they mean that the user is unaware of this workaround? Or do they mean it's obvious how it works (transparent) to the user?
- danudey 5y ago
  In this context, it means "this workaround happens without the user having to perform any additional steps"; not necessarily that they're unaware, but that it happens without their involvement and it doesn't seem that it's any different from the surface-level.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  It's an old software thing! "Transparent to the user" means "without the user knowing". Strange, right? I prefer "hidden from" to "transparent to" but I definitely use the latter a lot and it's quite clearly wrong!
  - inimino 5y ago
    It's not wrong. Glass is transparent to you. It precisely means that you don't see it.
    - renewiltord 5y ago
      You are right! Consider me convinced!

saurik 5y ago

Why would anyone try to "hide their deep knowledge of Postgres"? Like, I could easily see someone having to hide their deep knowledge of MongoDB--lest they be branded forever as "damaged"--but I've been under the impression that PostgreSQL skills are considered a really good thing this past decade or so... were they just really hoping to avoid becoming a database engineer, or were they maybe under threat of becoming an "on call" asset?

kamilm 5y ago
> Why would anyone try to "hide their deep knowledge of Postgres"? > or were they maybe under threat of becoming an "on call" asset? This is likely, especially if the person they're talking to tends to leech on other people's skills & time.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mmcgaha 5y ago
Sometimes it is better to be the student than the teacher.
brimble 5y ago
If you're specializing in something else but have knowledge of some other, unrelated thing, the latter is often at least accidentally concealed because it rarely comes up. Further, one might deliberately conceal it, to avoid having work assigned that distracts from the thing one is trying to focus on (for career development, personal preference, whatever reason). I've been known to pretend not to know a damn thing about WordPress, for instance. Even though I do.
striking 5y ago
> were they maybe under threat of becoming an "on call" asset You got it. A previous role as a database firefighter was something this individual did not want to continue at their new workplace.
- dvtrn 5y ago
  I’ve definitely done it for exactly this reason, and others mentioned in the thread: a strong desire to not suddenly become the ______ guy. Additional responsibility with no additional authority absolutely sucks when you get (a) pigeonholed, (b) saddled with every single request ever about _______ in addition to your other work or (c) some unholy combination of both. Especially when ______ only has enough “buy in” from decision makers to make the decision that you need to keep ______ alive because the business “needs”it but apparently not enough to properly source and acquire the necessary resources it needs compared to other business initiatives. Because “why do we need to do that? I thought you knew about ______ “ Go figure. I’m quite done volunteering myself like that.
  - kelnos 5y ago
    Heartily agreed. Additional responsibility without the authority to match just sets you up for failure. And rarely do you get extra pay for this additional responsibility anyway.
popularonion 5y ago
If people ever start seeing you as “the database guy”, you’ll be pigeonholed into that slot as long as you remain in that team. Or maybe their manager was just a really big fan of Oracle or something. I don’t know.
- vjust 5y ago
  Can confirm from experience. It took me years to shake that off and become known as a developer who could database. Its a function of whatever the team lacks. Once upon a time, DBA was a thing - I did manage to stay out of that deep pigeonhole luckily.
  - bifrost 5y ago
    DBA is absolutely still a thing, they fix things that developers make that deal with databases :)
    - worthless-trash 5y ago
      From my limited interactions with DBA's.. they rarley did anything outside of the database other than tell the developers their queries were inefficient or deploy new tables/databases/upgrades. I understand my view on the DBA may be limited, but are you serious ? Have I been unlucky and only ran into this weird subcategory ?
      - InvaderFizz 5y ago
        No, you experienced the average DBA which is probably someone that started as a Junior SysAdmin, futzed around with databases, liked that they could silo into that and do nothing else. The problem is that that is basically where all advancement stopped for them. They learned SQL well enough, they might even know how to do transaction rollbacks, but god help you if you have a real systemic problem that takes detailed knowledge of the whole system to unwind and fix without major data loss. I'm in the process of trying to convince management to hire a real Postgres expert(both inside and outside the database), because we are currently on a bad, checkbook driven path that is moving tons of our managed RDS Postgres databases to self-managed (and poorly architected) clusters on another cloud. I have neither the time nor the inclination to become a deep Postgres expert.
JohnHaugeland 5y ago
"Oh, you're a computer programmer? Can you help me with my printer?" But difficult, and with consequences.
- arunnanda 5y ago
  Printers can be harder, especially if you have driver trouble.
  - 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
    "Oh, you're a hacker? Can you help me with my printer?" I once extracted a PPD from a very expensive printer's firmware because the vendor didn't officially support Linux.
  - pcthrowaway 5y ago
    We could never get the damn things working in our office This was when I worked for HP
    - mark-r 5y ago
      I once fixed a bug caused by a faulty printer driver from HP. The driver changed the floating point control word and didn't change it back. Our program crashed while doing a completely innocuous operation, but only if you had printed to an HP printer earlier in the session.
      - mikestew 5y ago
        I remember that, because I worked on the MS FoxPro team at the time and report printing was crashing for a lot of users, but not all of them. Took forever to finally pin it down because, as parent comment points out, the culprit could have long left the building by the time the crash happens. Stupid driver sets the FPU to say "math errors like divide-by-zero are software's problem now, not mine" without telling software. IIRC (and this was over 20 years ago), operations had to be wrapped in/with the one line of code that flipped it back. But here's the thing: it wasn't just HP, it was a lot of print drivers. I suspected that there was some printer driver boilerplate out there, possibly even published by MS, that included this bug. (And, wow, did I swerve sharply into the off-topic lane for story time. Sorry.)
sam0x17 5y ago
Though it's rare these days, there is still such a thing as being modest
evilduck 5y ago
A few other scenarios: In an interview I don’t want to be intimidating and feigning ignorance can give the candidate opportunity to shine. If they go deep, I can keep up and keep pushing, if they veer into bullshitting I can tell and gracefully conclude without offending anyone. As a manager, not disclosing depth lets me ask stupid questions more frequently and in more contexts (for the benefit of others, for when I forget something or don’t understand something, as a Socratic teaching method, to help set the culture of asking questions, etc) Playing dumb is also a good way to avoid responsibility if you hate something, too, if a bit passive aggressive.
hinkley 5y ago
Similarly I know a lot about software management because I saw that it affects everything I do, and I needed to be able to push back on bad management. Doesn't mean I want to be a project manager. No, I don't, and please stop asking. And there are tasks you took on at old jobs because they needed to get done and nobody else would do it, so you got stuck. You did them. Maybe you even did them well. But they aren't on your resume, because you don't want to do it again. And if you mention them as anecdotes, you are careful where and when you bring them up.
mdellavo 5y ago
Why would some be branded damaged because they have knowledge of a tool? That's ludicrous. I've used many databases including mongo. They are all tools like any other with pros and cons and having experience with multiple across domains is a boon.
- recursive 5y ago
  It may be ludicrous, but it's not an uncommon point of view. "... teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery" - Edsger W. Dijkstra https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD898.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/E...
pharrington 5y ago
The competitive fighting game scene's term for this is "Hiding your power level".
kumarvvr 5y ago
In my home, I would want to be the dumb guy whose only knowledge of computers is to turn on the button. In my work, I would want to be the know it all, so that I can jump between good projects. In my consultation business I would want to be the master in the topic I work with. Depends on the context.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
Sometimes being seen as deeply knowledgeable will do nothing but create endless unpaid work for you. It is often the case that this work comes from people who don't know and don't want to know whatever it is you're good at. Surely everyone here can relate with the classic "computer guy" everyone takes advantage of. It turns out this exact same thing can happen in actual technology companies. All you have to do to become "that guy" is have knowledge about some vital technology that people don't actually want to care about. People will happily send anything related to it directly your way, increasing your workload and responsibilities with zero additional compensation. It seems databases are to many professionals what computers are to laymen. They depend on this technology but they don't fully understand how it works or how to fix problems. They still want to define the database schema and make other key decisions. If there's any problem, they don't want the responsibility, they want to be able to offload it to some "database guy". Who wants to be that guy?

bryanrasmussen 5y ago

ok, but Toast being the best thing since sliced bread is also a somewhat antiquated vernacular expression, I mean obviously the best thing since sliced bread is often used without toast as the thing being referred to but it was also often the case that toast was being referred to> https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/02/how-the-phrase-the-best-thing-since-sliced-bread-originated/252674/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/02/how-the-p...

glouwbug 5y ago
Yeah, maybe the guy just has a sense of humor - something that your average software developer would mistake for being a reference to documentation
- gowld 5y ago
  This is wholly unnecessary.
  - Izkata 5y ago
    What's unnecessary, a sense of humor? ;)
gowld 5y ago
Toast predates machine-sliced bread, which is what "sliced bread" refers to. Sliced bread made toast better (easier to automate), but that doesn't make toast the best thing since sliced bread. The article you linked explains that "sliced bread" is the best thing, to which all later (not just bready) inventions are compared.
- giaour 5y ago
  Isn't the joke that the particular piece of toast always postdates the particular slice of bread it was made from? I.e., toast is the best thing since sliced bread because first we had sliced bread, and then we toasted it. It's a dumb dad joke
- 5y ago

swsieber 5y ago

I am not familiar with Postgreql. I would make that joke.

reidjs 5y ago

I'm a little bit confused by the wording "This happens transparently to the user," I assume they mean that the user is unaware of this workaround? Or do they mean it's obvious how it works (transparent) to the user?

danudey 5y ago
In this context, it means "this workaround happens without the user having to perform any additional steps"; not necessarily that they're unaware, but that it happens without their involvement and it doesn't seem that it's any different from the surface-level.
renewiltord 5y ago
It's an old software thing! "Transparent to the user" means "without the user knowing". Strange, right? I prefer "hidden from" to "transparent to" but I definitely use the latter a lot and it's quite clearly wrong!
- inimino 5y ago
  It's not wrong. Glass is transparent to you. It precisely means that you don't see it.
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    You are right! Consider me convinced!