I'm mostly surprised how developers as a community can both:

- Espouse we really need to care about communication in every form

- Still manage to let a few 'seniors' capable of solving the problem do so, at the cost of destroying most momentum by making the solution incredibly difficult to reason about and leaving next to zero documentation behind.

Then again, when business doesn't give the time to fix this or doublecheck, it's no wonder. And then hiring managers look cross-eyed at developers for wanting to work on green project instead of the next dumpster fire

The market demand for database work is primarily not in making mid-size databases work better, but in making the "mid-size database" abstraction work on increasingly large (and increasingly distributed) datasets. I'm familiar with large companies who routinely run SQL queries over ~all their logs; a decade ago that would have been somewhere between extremely challenging and impossible.

When you have three folders stuffed with hundreds of files that are laced with your ORM annotations the ship has already sailed.