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General Discussion

Posted by john larson
john larson
16,594 Points

I met a programmer that only works w/SQL...

I meet a lot of people in my current line of work. I talked to this guy for a bit. He went to college for five years, did a three year internship, and now has a job that he seems pretty content with. He works with just SQL, and a php framework(vanilla) to manage it. I have several thoughts about this.

  1. I kinda beat myself up for not learning everything in 18 months. So maybe that's an unrealistic expectation.
  2. Is it really possible to learn just SQL and get a decent job? Or was he just fortunate?

1 Answer

Jennifer Nordell
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STAFF
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Jennifer Nordell
Treehouse Teacher
Jennifer Nordell
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Jennifer Nordell
Treehouse Teacher

Well, first never beat yourself up for learning! Learning at any speed is a good thing :smiley:

Almost every system uses some sort of database. And while NoSQL is growing, I'd be willing to bet that it's mostly SQL that's still used today to access these systems. Big businesses with big databases need experts. So, it is possible to get a job just relating to database administration/design/optimization. But keep in mind that while SQL is the language used to retrieve information from a database (in most cases), there are plenty of other concepts revolving around relational database implementation/backup/optimization/normalization etc that are outside of SQL.

Hope this helps! :sparkles:

john larson
john larson
16,594 Points

So I think your saying that although he portrayed himself as only doing one thing, he had to learn lots of things to actually do that one thing?

Jennifer Nordell
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Jennifer Nordell
Treehouse Teacher
Jennifer Nordell
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Jennifer Nordell
Treehouse Teacher

Very likely, yes. Now, he could have gotten very fortunate and they gave him a job where he simply types in commands to issue to the database after they have decided what they want, but I find that highly unlikely. I could be wrong though :smiley:

john larson
john larson
16,594 Points

Thanks Jennifer.