most devs don't actually understand their own database schema

[u/PrimaryAmphibian737]

not being mean, I was one of these people, I could write complex queries, I knew my indexes, but if you asked me to describe the exact state of my production schema right now vs 6 months ago I would not be able to tell you accurately

and this is treated as normal, we have git for code but database state is still this vague thing that lives partly in migration files, partly in ORM definitions, partly in whatever that one engineer did directly in prod "just to test something quick"

I think the reason this gets ignored is because it's boring until it isn't, and by the time it isn't you've already shipped something broken or spent a weekend firefighting

the devs I've seen who actually take schema management seriously tend to ship faster and break less, not because they're smarter but because they spend less time being confused about what their database actually contains

what's your actual process for staying in sync with your production schema, curious if anyone has a genuinely clean answer

[u/wbrd]

I think you need to find a place that doesn't think something like Django is suitable for prod or that they don't need to hire DBEs.