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swyx 🔜 Dev | Writers | Miami
@swyx
This thread of backend engineers discovering what ACID databases are, and asking if it matters, feels like it touches on a fundamental tension in our industry Would you require that a backend engineer know what ACID is to hire them? Even if they sling PostgreSQL like a champ?
comment thread about ACID
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Coding Career
@Coding_Career
Succeed. Fail. Get a star performance review. Get a mediocre performance review. Fuck around and do nothing. It doesn't seem to matter. The range of possibility there is a raise of 0-5%. Answer the recruiters and you get a minimum 20% raise. I am currently in line for a 50% raise. I have hopped every 11-14 months at this point and gone from 65K to 80K to 120K to 180K if I accept my latest job offer. And I have never passed a leetcode challenge in my life that didn't use a Greedy algo, so I am not even good at interviewing. I have never worked for a company that was so good that it offered stock options. What the fuck is an ACID database? Damned if I know as a senior backend engineer. But even then, with no real interviewing skill, I still do far better interviewing than trying at my job. I am an extremely risk-averse and cowardly individual, so should be the prime type of person to be kept comfortable in a bucket with piddly increases. I take forever to get used to and to trust peop
"This career feels like a few key hours every year with a few near mandatory year-long cool-down periods in between where what you do barely matters." 😬 Who else has felt like this and what did you do about it? old.reddit.com/r/cscareerques
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
Replying to
@swyx
In ~2010 there was this big hype cycle of NoSQL vs SQL databases. The critics pointed out that the NoSQL offerings achieved their performance characteristics because no ACID guarantees. Eventually they turned out to be right and people were like “ok ACID matters”.
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
Replying to
@ejames_c
and
@swyx
So I can see why one doesn’t need to know about ACID guarantees to be effective at one’s job; that said I would probably be suspicious of the developer’s technical judgment when it comes to picking databases. Thankfully that doesn’t happen a lot!
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swyx 🔜 Dev | Writers | Miami
@swyx
Replying to
@ejames_c
"I am a postgresql specialist because it is open source and reliable af" is a pretty good reason not to know anything else about database implementations and just spend the rest of your career knowing postgres nuances tbh. not everyone needs to be horizontally aware
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
Replying to
@swyx
There’s an interesting question here about whether “not knowing about ACID indicates lack of depth of knowledge in Postgres.” Because you can’t go very far before you stumble onto Postgres’s MVCC implementation, and then a good backend dev should ask “wait, what is this for?”
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