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> Do people usually have the SQL language so well memorized that they can pull it out of their head on command? I swear to god I'm not the only engineer who reg

> Do people usually have the SQL language so well memorized that they can pull it out of their head on command? I swear to god I'm not the only engineer who regularly goes to the cheat sheet. I think the key insight for you here is that there are many jobs where the only technical skill used is SQL. You probably should know this stuff like the back of your hand for such roles. Old, slow moving, large companies have many people doing this sort of work. Contrast with a generic "developer" at some startup who uses SQL as only one part of much larger and more complex applications. As a "developer" you have to deal with so much obscure syntax in your life (actual programming languages, shells, dockerfiles, kubernetes yaml, helm, god knows how many 3rd party APIs, ci/cd definitions, other rando DSLs...) that you won't be able to keep everything in working memory.

ecshafer 3y ago
Ironically working at a big old company I wrote almost no SQL, because the database was DB2, so we had dedicated Data developers to write stored procedures in COBOL / SQL. While at a small shop and a more modern tech company I wrote tons of SQL.
- sgift 3y ago
  Same, my best experiences with getting data out of DBs - in an earlier job where I had to work with many external customers directly - were the big ones, cause they always had dedicated Database dev teams that could prepare the data in a way that worked for me and the database. Contrast this with the small shops, which - if at all - had someone as a db admin (usually in addition to their normal job) and could only provide database access and "here, figure it out", which meant I had to write all the SQL myself. But I think that supports the GPs point. At big companies you are more specialized, which means if you get hired into the database dev team you better know SQL really well, cause the non-database devs won't even get access to it and instead depend on you.

ecshafer 3y ago

Ironically working at a big old company I wrote almost no SQL, because the database was DB2, so we had dedicated Data developers to write stored procedures in COBOL / SQL. While at a small shop and a more modern tech company I wrote tons of SQL.

sgift 3y ago
Same, my best experiences with getting data out of DBs - in an earlier job where I had to work with many external customers directly - were the big ones, cause they always had dedicated Database dev teams that could prepare the data in a way that worked for me and the database. Contrast this with the small shops, which - if at all - had someone as a db admin (usually in addition to their normal job) and could only provide database access and "here, figure it out", which meant I had to write all the SQL myself. But I think that supports the GPs point. At big companies you are more specialized, which means if you get hired into the database dev team you better know SQL really well, cause the non-database devs won't even get access to it and instead depend on you.