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Comment by debaserab2 | Hacker News Reader

I don't agree. If you're designing data structures in a code base you shoulder some of the responsibility for the persistence characteristics of that data.

There's a lot of devs that think database design is the same as starting a new ORM class and generating a migration file.

> Database, security, accessibility, performance, infrastructure, tooling and productivity, business concerns, workflow processes (agile), language concerns, new things

Yes, these are all things that devs should strive to know as much about as possible. Software isn't easy. It takes a long time to become an expert. 10 years sounds about right.

> Who knows if we'll add a new category next year?

Skill domains do come and go, but I think the ones you've listed are solid staples of web development for the past decade and likely will still be for a decade more.

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> I don't agree. If you're designing data structures in a code base you shoulder some of the responsibility for the persistence characteristics of that data.

There's usually not a relationship that goes the other way though, for example, developers don't tell DBAs to pick up code so they can write the models in our language in addition to the underlying SQL. This highlights a trend of increasing responsibilities pushed onto the developer.

>Yes, these are all things that devs should strive to know as much about as possible. Software isn't easy. It takes a long time to become an expert. 10 years sounds about right.

But in some cases it's specialists designating what an expert developer should know. It's giving away control in some respects. This turns into new job requirements and a higher barrier for entry. The growth will need to stop at some point.

Agree with this. There's the whole DevOps nowdays as well, which basically just shifts what used to be an entirely separate, full-time, role onto the developer. Adding DBA to that sounds like it would benefit noone, except perhaps business owners looking for short-term savings at the expense of productivity, ala open-office floor plans.

Keep in mind that full time role used to be a hell of a lot of work. Take the project I'm working on right now: https://gist.github.com/ajbdev/11f494906ebb6aa3f6bdf35f2437e...

In ~50 lines of code I can erect a load balanced set of web servers with my app binary preloaded, secured in a private VPN subnet with an auto-scaling policy attached to it.

15 years ago this project would have meant:

- Racking new hardware somewhere on premise

- Configuring several routers and networking equipment

- Tweaking the different software responsible for the different app layers (load balancing, web servers, etc)

- Hoping we forecasted demand correctly and whatever hardware we racked can handle a traffic spike or growth surge

You needed a lot more expertise back then.

And really you can trade all of what I'm doing for a higher level of abstraction that requires even less knowledge of the underlying technology (netlify, heroku, amplify, etc) if you're willing to pay a little more.

In most places I have worked, knowing the database well enough to manage it and at very least write stored procedures has always been expected from developers writing database related code.

I have been doing this for a little more than 30 years now, so it isn't "nowadays" thing.

Sure, knowing your database well enough to "manage it" in terms of indexes, bloat, writing procedures, that's a developer responsibility.

What is "new", is developers having to manage the DB backups, k8s clusters, Docker images, Terraform, load balancers, CI/CD, proxies etc.

This used to be a role for a whole another role. Some places do have an "Ops" role, but most tasks are still expected off the developer, with Ops at best providing a helping hand, rather than taking over a task completely.

> There's usually not a relationship that goes the other way though, for example, developers don't tell DBAs to pick up code so they can write the models in our language in addition to the underlying SQL. This highlights a trend of increasing responsibilities pushed onto the developer.

Yes, because as a developer you're the one who has the responsibility of implementing the business requirements of the app. There's no trend here; this is the way it's always been. The buck stops with development for a lot of things. The developer is in a unique position to respond to many incidents because they have an intimate understanding of how the business requirements wed with the technology in ways someone like a DBA does not.

DBA's have plenty of responsibilities of their own, such as handling a 3AM alarm that goes off when some part on the application starts hammering the DB from some poorly designed N+1 query problem in the codebase. Often times when the DBA tries to teach the developer it's because he's sick of getting those 3AM wake-up calls.

> But in some cases it's specialists designating what an expert developer should know. It's giving away control in some respects. This turns into new job requirements and a higher barrier for entry. The growth will need to stop at some point.

That's a strange mindset to have. Different jobs have different technologies, and as a developer you learn how to work with them. The specialists aren't designating anything, the job you're responsible for is.

>Often times when the DBA tries to teach the developer it's because he's sick of getting those 3AM wake-up calls.

And if he just learned to code, he could write all the queries himself, check in his own code, and never have 3AM calls. I see no reason why a DBA couldn't manage to write queries in source, especially with some hand-holding w.r.t. source control and check-in rituals. If they are already doing too much, just hire or train more of them. DBAs are equally as smart as devs. Loop DBAs into the business requirements.

>That's a strange mindset to have. Different jobs have different technologies, and as a developer you learn how to work with them. The specialists aren't designating anything, the job you're responsible for is.

This is very push/pull about who should own what and I personally think devs are often responsible for too much. In silo'd places, make no mistake that input is gathered about who owns what. In more collaborative environments, you see the other sides willing to step in and share the responsibilities; blurred lines, but they are still there. What we've adopted is an over-reliance that a dev will just learn many things and we hope he's good enough at all of them that we don't really need deep knowledge or need to delegate work.

> There's a lot of devs that think database design is the same as starting a new ORM class and generating a migration file.

Yes, this. Add to the list those who have drunk the DDD koolaid and the database is "merely an implementation detail".

as someone with 6 yoe and who considers himself a decent developer, I am looking for ways which can help me to be so-called expert developer-- I don't mean to say it mockingly.

Genuinely interested in the advice which can help to gain more than I will on my own with my current trajectory.

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