Reading the thread so far, I see SQL and bash suggested as being valuable skills. Can you suggest more skills and tools like these that are timeless and valuable?
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SQL: One of the most valuable skills
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Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills
#62As a dev, I have to use a query builder. It's frustrating because it's ten times more complicated than SQL and slower to execute, with basically zero advantages.
Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills
#63Reading the thread so far, I see SQL and bash suggested as being valuable skills. Can you suggest more skills and tools like these that are timeless and valuable?
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Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills
#64I consider myself functional, but not proficient in SQL. Is there a reliable and easy way to assess one's skills in SQL? I feel that most of the new things I learn about SQL these days are database specific. I wonder whether I'm missing out on something, or do I already have the "core" SQL knowledge down, and everything else is special cases?
(self plug) take a look at pgexercises.com . It's Postgres-focused but mostly cross-platform, and I think it covers most of the important stuff.
Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills
#65I spent a year in a role where 50% of my duties was writing sql reports. These reports where usually between 500 and 1000 lines of sql a pop. Sometimes the runtime of the report was measured in hours, so learning efficient sql was important. The company had a lot of people that had been writing sql for awhile, and there were lots of cool code snippets floating around. I learned a lot in that year. I've moved to writi…
Any recommendations of a place for sharing "extremely advanced" SQL skills?
Asking from wanting to make use of such a place, and haven't seen anything like it. So, probably need to bootstrap one instead (etc).
Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills
#66I’ve been a career analyst for about 12 years so I write SQL every day. I know it very well. I’ve developed a very strong love / hate relationship with it over the years. On one hand, you write what you want to find in fairly common language and you almost always get back what you want if you do it correctly. In many ways, it’s like a precursor to Alexa but in written form. It’s super easy to pick up for non technica…
> It’s super easy to pick up for non technical people.
I haven't found that particularly true. I've trained people in SQL and yes, they can do the basics pretty well, but it requires a particular skill to actually write effect complex SQL statements. Non-technical people, being non-technical, generally cannot do that.
> it’s extremely difficult to code review
I don't see why it's any more difficult than any other logic? It's always important to test.
Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills
#67SQL is one the most amazing concepts I've ever experienced. It's nearly 5 decades old and there is no sign of a replacement. We've created countless other technologies to store and process data, and we always seem to try to re-create SQL in those technologies (e.g. Hive, Presto, KSQL, etc).
I run a early stage company that builds analytics infrastructure for companies. We are betting very heavily on SQL, and Craigs post rings true now more than ever.
Increasingly, more SQL is written in companies by analysts and data scientists than typical software engineers.
The advent of the MMP data warehouse (redshift, bigquery, snowflake, etc) has given companies with even the most limited budget the ability to warehouse and query an enormous amount of data just using SQL. SQL is more powerful and valuable today than it ever has been.
When you look into a typical organization, most software engineers aren't very good at SQL. Why should they be? Most complex queries are analytics queries. ORMs can handle a majority of the basic functions application code needs to handle.
Perhaps going against Craig's point is the simple fact that we've abstracted SQL away from a lot of engineers across the backend and certainly frontend and mobile. You can be a great developer and not know a lot about SQL.
On the other end of the spectrum are the influx of "data engineers" with basic to intermediate knowledge of HDFS, streaming data or various other NoSQL technologies. They often know less about raw SQL than even junior engineers because SQL is below their high-power big data tools.
But if you really understand SQL, and it seems few people truly today, you command an immense amount of power. Probably more than ever.
Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills
#68I recently had a candidate that had very good Scala skills and very poor SQL skills. Despite Scala and spark being powerful, you can over complicate a solution in those languages that could otherwise be easily solved in SQL. That’s interesting to me because I see SQL as a fundamental tool that you build on top of and some people these days seems to skip it.
I never encountered SQL or at all in my CS education. I got pretty good at Scala for Scalding MapReduce before writing my first SQL query. Learning the basics only took a few days after that.
If someone has enough understanding of data and CS fundamentals to be very good at Spark/Scala, learning SQL isn't going to be much of a barrier for them. I find that the bigger problem is usually people who have a very strong understanding of SQL but no clue as to the resources needed to perform different kinds of operations.
Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills
#69Reading the thread so far, I see SQL and bash suggested as being valuable skills. Can you suggest more skills and tools like these that are timeless and valuable?
Communication. Particularly the ability to cross the boundary between technical talk and non-technical talk. People like other people who are easy to talk with. Also you will be more likely to build what is actually needed, rather than what someone thought they needed.
One of the most useful books I've ever read was "Thanks for the Feedback" [1]
I've read a lot of the more standard books like "How to Win Friends and Influence People", etc. I feel like this book is similarly valuable, but a lot less well known.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18114120-thanks-for-the-...
Re: SQL: One of the most valuable skills
#70My first job out of university was on an analytics team at a consulting firm (big enough that you know them) that used MS SQL Server for absolutely everything. Data cleaning? SQL. Feature engineering? SQL. Pipelines of stored procedures, stored in other stored procedures. Some of these procedures were so convoluted that they outputted tables with over 700 features, and had queries that were hundreds of lines long. Ev…
You can do some insanely complicated stuff in a stored procedure. A favourite was versioning and updating a set of data across multiple tables as an atomic transaction.
Also MS SQL let you throw a data object (say XML) at a stored procedure, convert it to a table structure with some XPath (another useful black art like regex) and use that as the input to a single INSERT.