Hand-written SQL means a bunch of work and you have to know SQL. But it is simple and transparent.
ORMs automate a lot of simple and repetitive SQL, but to use them effectively you really have to know SQL extremely well and understand the ORM deeply as well.
So I guess it depends on what you are doing. ORMs can be useful but they require a lot more knowledge to use effectively than hand-coded SQL does.
> ORMs automate a lot of simple and repetitive SQL, but to use them effectively you really have to know SQL extremely well and understand the ORM deeply as well.
I'm not sure. You need to know the relational model pretty well, but you don't have to remember the zillions of quirks and edge cases or differences between dialects that SQL has. IME that's what takes most of the memorization effort.
So, really, all we need then is a language sufficiently precise enough to specify what a program needs to do and we can then feed it into a program which can write software that implements that specification, possibly adopting safe transformations of it into equivalent forms.
Now, that safely describes a modern, optimizing C compiler.....
I think the problem of engineering management is that componentization is a hard problem. One needs to recognize that Conway's Law is an inevitability, but it can be a positive as well as a negative thing. If you design your organization around needs for components, then you end up with limited contracts.
Even the organizations that I have worked for that have been better at this than others have still struggled. Perhaps there is room to just point out that high-level architects need to be involved in people and organization decisions.
In the end, flatter organizations are better, but structure of both organizations and software are hard problems and things that we struggle with throughout our careers on either track. I have usually fought to have ICs report at every level so that part makes sense.
But the question becomes what you replace middle management with? The answer shouldn't be "chaos."
I think a more likely scenario is that all countries did what they could and China succeeded better than any other major land country. But then, as victims of their success, the costs of doing less increased with each new wave and when Omicron hit Hong Kong, the death rate soared in a way it didn't in the West.
Hong Kong was not the only place to have high death rates from Omicron. New Zealand did as well. But none of the countries which had difficulty controlling earlier Covid outbreaks did.
We are often prisoners of our own successes more than we are victims of our errors.
I am an American expat who just moved from Germany to Indonesia about six months ago. One thing I see is that the comments he makes about China echo my views of the West. Where there was once optimism and openness, there is growing political repression (though in the US, we outsource this to the private sector so that we can actively argue that it doesn't exist). What is driving a lot of this in the West is the effort to sever economic ties with both Russia and China. I can imagine that this provokes a similar though opposite-facing response in countries like Russia and China, as if Newton's Third Law applies to geopolitics as well. My brother lives in Beijing, though.
What I see in Southeast Asia, though, is quite different. While there is a lot of uncertainty about the direction of global geopolitics, and while this also has a strong effort at finding a direction towards economic development on their own terms. Indonesia is becoming increasingly assertive in this regard, for example banning export of nickel ore (and ending up in a legal fight with the EU over that), and planning to do the same for bauxite soon as well. These bans are designed to ensure that those who want to exploit the nation's natural resources have to contribute directly to its economic development on Indonesian and not WTO, US, or EU terms.
Indonesian approaches to social management and rule of law are still quite foreign to me but these (even more than in the US) are very decentralized. A majority of the population still works independently or for small family businesses though the largest employer is the government. I still struggle with the disconnect between rules and laws. But the optimism here, in part born by the hope that the legacy of colonialism may finally be drawing to a close, is contagious.
I think sometimes leaving the great powers can be liberating.
Moving from Germany to Indonesia is a wild move! Did you move to Bali or somewhere else?
"the West": This term is meaningless to me. Does this include Africa, South America, AUS/NS, Middle East?
"Where there was once optimism and openness, there is growing political repression": In continental Europe? I don't think so. Please provide concrete examples.
I am in Jakarta. was thinking of moving to Bali but that isn't practical.
I think you know what "The West" is when you are outside it. If you look at which countries are sanctioning Russia, it overlaps almost entirely with that list (i.e. that list of states minus Japan and Korea though some folks might argue that Japan and Korea are in fact Western -- not including quasi-states like North Korea or Taiwan in that assessment). That doesn't say
'"Where there was once optimism and openness, there is growing political repression": In continental Europe? I don't think so. Please provide concrete examples.'
Certainly there is less than in the US due to the fact that free speech law binds the private sector as well as the public sector and that, in theory, discrimination on the basis of political or other opinion is forbidden.
That being said, I watched protests during the Covid years treated differently depending on political views. In essence protests for in-favor causes were given go-aheads while protests for out-of-favor causes were restricted or banned. This may be changing now in Germany at least for the better.
I don't like the far-right but when legal far-right parties are restricted in an ability to rally because political opponents to them blame the spread of Covid on them (overlooking more likely causes like cross-border commuting to a country with far higher problems), then I get nervous since usually I find myself, more often than not, fairly far left economically at least.
"I don't think so. Please provide concrete examples."
You would get fired in Sweden if you spoke against mass immigration just 15 years ago. The social democrats still ban people who have romantic relationships with an individual of the nationalist party.
Working corporate in the west is about having the correct progressive opinions, dissent means you are an evil conspiracy theorist. Just 2 years ago it was evil and racist conspiracy theorist to say that Covid came from a lab leak.
It's evil to say the the truth until the emperor becomes absolutely naked, such as the case with mass immigration in Sweden. When you suddenly have more murders than the UK (a 7x larger country) and bombings every day it's kinda hard to deny that immigration has a link to crime.
Where are you getting these facts? Sweden and the UK have the same per-capita murder rate, so Sweden being 1/7 the size of UK means 1/7 the total murders.
I wonder how the context by which these enter the production environment affect the relevant harm caused by either. For example, drunkenness happens via escallations to those not on call, while tiredness comes into play routinely and at all levels.
As a result drunk individuals usually are facing narrow technical problems where thinking is required, and judgments already made, while tired people are facing the whole situation.
On call engineer wakes up to an alert. Realizes there is a major problem developing that he or she is underqualified to handle. Escalates the call.
Eventually this gets escalated to the top subject matter expert in the company. He's not on call, has been out partying, and is drunk.
Where does this become unacceptable? I am certainly not saying people should show up to work drunk, but unless you say anyone in the escallation chain may never be drunk, it is going to happen.
I think there are contextual reasons why drunken incidence response, despite being largely unavoidable (you cannot expect your subject matter experts never to consume alcohol) causes few problems.
However, I think one under-recognized problem is that there is a complacency that comes with being tired. And when I look at the really big incidence response disasters, that has always been a major factor.
And yet we celebrate people who put us at risk....
