The best programmers I know

One of my favorite features of Entity Framework from my .NET days is that it's very easy to just break out of the ORM functionality, even from within an EF-specific function, or to have multiple instances with slightly different configuration (I never had to do that last bit but I know it was possible a decade ago).

But in your example, even if an ORM doesn't provide native breakout functionality, it should be obvious that you can maintain a bespoke path to the database for cases where the ORM doesn't fit. Where that isn't obvious to someone, perhaps 'creating their own ORM' isn't the waste of time you make it out to be, but is actually necessary education?

If you are No-name CRUD Company you're probably not hiring the million dollar per year devs who have learned all the lessons. You kind of have to accept that you are working with budget workers and thus learning on the job is going to need to take place, even if you wish that weren't the reality you face.

At the risk of going off on a tangent, the median dev salary is something like $100-150k/yr. So half of devs in the country make less than that. Gergely Orosz has a great discussion of this.[0] $1m/yr TC is the top 0.01% of the top tier of companies. Some FAANG-level tech firms are here but otherwise it's almost entirely IB, HFT, hedge funds, that sort of thing. I'd be shocked if anyone making close to $1m/yr TC is ever touching an ORM in their day job.

[0] https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/trimodal-nature-o...

But, as I said, even if it isn't built-in, it doesn't make any difference, does it? Either way there is no reason to throw a perfectly good ORM out the window just because in some cases it isn't the right tool for the job. Surely you agree? That was my interpretation of the intent of your earlier comment.

While it may be true that ORMs today are of SQLite quality, the original commenter's point still stands: You need to make sure that is the case, else you are going to quickly wish that you did write it yourself.

> So half of devs in the country make less than that.

You may take things a bit too literally, but if you want to go down this road, do you truly believe that half of all devs have learned all the lessons there are to learn in software? Color me skeptical. 0.01% is likely even pushing it.

Even back when it was launched EF was miles ahead of most mature ORMs of today, and I believe your 95% number. But other than EF plus a handful of other mature ORMs, the 95% number looks more like 50%.

I would even argue that new-ish ORMs are virtually useless for anything that's not CRUD, and that the CRUD part can be 100% replaced seamlessly by something like PostgREST/Supabase or Hasura without losing much.

I don't disagree with the feeling in general, but I feel like we are making mistakes by having as much faith in modern ORMs and even libraries in general. Veeeeeeery few things even come close to being 1% as good as Entity Framework, ASP.NET, Rails, Postgres or SQLite.

I have a side project that uses Clerk for auth but basically every other supabase product there is and it really is great for smaller use cases. I don't know how it stacks up once you start needing really fine-tuned database permissions or functionality though.

I find it that if you accept Supabase as-is, it can get you pretty far and save a lot of time and money.

And for edge cases, it's like you said above about ORMs, we don't have to throw it out, we just handle those cases separately.

Slowly replaced it with Dapper and handwritten SQL, a simple migration versioning system, and database seeding with validation. Once that was done, startup time was cut by more than 10 seconds on a standard SSD and about 30 on CFast. Even finally replacing the database connection with SQLite standard libraries shaved off 2 seconds.

EntityFramework maybe useful but it lacks performance when time to start using the software is important.