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It was kinda debatable until people started Claude coding everything. Even before, I would've said every SWE should just know SQL, it's not much buy-in to understand the foundation of like your entire backend. Also I'm not a DBA if that's what you meant.

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I have never seen a dev and we never would hire a dev that doesn’t know SQL and yet we still use ORM for each and every app we develop.

Leaning SQL is arguably less dev work over the long run than learning an ORM and then learning how it works so you can fix performance issues.

Yep, there have been extended periods of time where my entire job title might as well have been "ORM remover" because they backed themselves into a corner

Do you have any meaningful experience as a software developer?

That’s a silly take. I somehow learned over the long run: SQL different flavors, couple of ORMs, multiple programming languages and multiple frameworks. Not counting different troubleshooting different operating systems and different applications I had to work with.

We all learn whatever we need to learn to deal with the situation. I've had to learn more distinct ORMs than SQL flavors, even though you also need to know the SQL when you use an ORM. Doesn't mean I wanted to.

However, each time a teammate wanted to use an ORM, I didn't call it silly or question their credentials.

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