alt Hacker NewsIt should be table stakes for any SWEs working on backend, but it's not. The DB and the code directly interacting with it are way more important than anything you're going to write on top. I keep ending up in situations where I'm the only SWE in the room who really knows SQL, let alone proper schema design, and I have to speak up or else they're going to build an abomination.
But for a lot of people, the focus there is in the "write on top" layer, because they enjoy it more (I suspect). Constraints etc are tested there.
But this is caused by another shift (I didn't experience this firsthand so bear with me); early databases often had multiple clients, nowadays it's often a 1:1 relationship with one application owning the DB. Which makes putting in constraints in SQL feel clunky.
The biggest casualty of that is probably stored procedures.