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Comment by Goladus | Hacker News Reader

Has it ever actually happened that a developer had 10 years experience building websites on MySQL, very strong domain expertise in some non-programming field, and no knowledge of InnoDB?

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I don't know, but I'm sure it has. If your primary interface to MySQL is a GUI tool where you just click the "create table" button, type in a name and accept the other defaults, you could be using MyISAM tables without knowing anything about table types.

Don't forget, that 10 years of experience could just be 1 year repeated 10 times. A cardinal number of years doesn't always equate to increasing breadth of knowledge.

Of course it doesn't, but if 10 years of experience results in domain expertise somewhere else, but some cherry-picked detail about storage engines is missed then there is probably a good reason for it.

In my experience, someone with really strong domain expertise in something like bioinformatics, doesn't actually have 10 years building websites on MySQL.

Yes. It has happened many times. I talk to people who rate themselves highly in all things MySQL and can barely write a join and can't really explain anything about how it works.

That's not what I asked, though. It's easy to believe someone says they know MySQL but doesn't. It's the combination of all of them that I'm skeptical about.

1. Has built websites for 10 years

2. Websites have all been on MySQL

3. Is a verifiable domain expert in a field that is useful to you but isn't programming.

No I have had 1 and 2 though. I haven't really met anyone who tried to convince me they knew anything other than programming and databases to be honest. I'm also not sure how that would come up.

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