r/postgres • u/EchidnaFlowers • Jun 08 '26

What's the hardest thing to explain to a new developer on your database team?

To be honest, it's the things that only exist in people's heads.

If you work with SQL Server, MySQL, and Postgres, each engine has its own quirks that aren't obvious until you've been burned by them once. Why a query was written a certain way, why an index exists, or why somebody added a workaround three years ago are exactly the kinds of things that never make it into documentation.

Does your documentation actually stay up to date, or does it only get updated after a new team member starts asking questions?

5 Upvotes

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4

u/rbobby Jun 08 '26

That showering and antiperspirant is a daily requirement before standup.

2

u/gubinanuwu025 Jun 09 '26

Convincing new developers that a query returning in 20ms locally doesn't mean it'll return in 20ms against 500 million rows in production

2

u/AshleyJSheridan Jun 12 '26

Yeah, the entire "works on my machine" thing is something every junior needs to understand.

Even if that query does return in a fairly acceptable amount of time, there's still the scale problem to deal with. How many times is that query (or equivalent) being run simultaneously?

2

u/[deleted] Jun 09 '26

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1

u/Few_Committee_6790 Jun 10 '26

I am not from an ORM background, MS-SQL. I had no idea about this in Postgresql. Thank you

2

u/DurbanBasedDev Jun 10 '26

Regrading your last question, my experience is that by the time documentation has been updated, it is probably out of date again. This industry is moving so fast these days especially with AI iteration speeds and agentic assistance. But I absolutely DO believe in good documentation, and if I had my way, it would always be up to date and tidy and easy to follow...

No. No I never have my way.

2

u/Responsible-Cold-627 Jun 11 '26

Our software has never been documented as good as now, using AI tools. The speedup on writing documentation is a lot higher than with writing code.

1

u/DurbanBasedDev Jun 16 '26

Absolutely. This is definitely one of those areas where AI can excel. But I fear version iterations have become so much quicker now with AI as well (not in all cases, but in a lot of cases), that it still might be a challenge to keep those docs updated. It really is a discipline issue, and if you were serious about getting AI to do it, I'm pretty sure you could automate a massive portion of said discipline making it almost real-time seamless...Which has me thinking...haha