State of the Software Engineering Jobs Market, 2025: What Hiring Managers See

THE PRAGMATIC ENGINEER ^ | Oct 07, 2025 | Gergely Orosz

[Political Junkie Too]

When I was recruited out of college, the person doing the campus interview asked me to write a program to do matrix multiplication. I asked him if he wanted it FORTRAN, PL/1, or COBOL.

At work many (many) years ago (ca. Oracle 6), I got into an argument with a DBA who was looking at my SQL code. I coded a correlated subquery for a table that contained values that I wanted to exclude from my set. I had a "not in (select... from a.table 1...) and he said you don't us NOT in a subselect. I said of course not, but this is not a subselect, it's a correlated subquery and NOT is just fine.

He didn't get it. He refused to believe me that NOT was okay.

Back then, nobody was using correlated subqueries because it was too complicated for the average programmer to understand, but the explains were very efficient. I woulld nest them two or three deep, because they're great at index retrievals without returning row data. The system I built was eventually sold to Price Waterhouse by the business side of the project, and years later I saw correlated subqueries everywhere in their code.

-PJ

[grey_whiskers]

Spoken like a true Federal worker with lifetime tenure, fat pension, and gold-plated healthcare for life.

[grey_whiskers]

Well done, sir.

[McGruff]

I’m glad I’m retired.

[GingisK]

Grace was simply awe-inspiring. She also chose her team well. We get where we are going perched on the shoulders of giants.

[posterchild]

I believe it was Grace (or someone on her team) who found a moth on a circuit board causing problems - and originated the term ‘computer bug.’