I wouldn't say so. Concurrency bugs, like lost updates, can be very subtle and hard to debug, and common databases don't prevent these kinds of bugs by default.
If someone on my team was writing a web app and spending time meddling around with transactions outside of whatever abstraction layer we were using on top of the DB without an incredibly good reason, we'd definitely be having a coaching moment, and if it continued, I'd likely help them find a role with another org where they might be a better fit.
Any quality database abstraction provides fairly simple means to perform transactions.
>If someone on my team was writing a web app and spending time meddling around with transactions outside of whatever abstraction layer we were using on top of the DB without an incredibly good reason, we'd definitely be having a coaching moment, and if it continued, I'd likely help them find a role with another org where they might be a better fit.
And most people with knowledge of DBs should run, not walk, away from a team that operates like that...
Because if you are writing a fairly standard web app, you don't need this. There isn't the scale to make it important. Software is a very large field, with a wide variety of use cases. Obviously an exchange trading platform is going to have much more focus on these DB issues than a SaaS web app for business that expects at most 5,000-10,000 users at a time. With very few of those user modifying the same records.
>Because if you are writing a fairly standard web app, you don't need this.
Does the app handle user accounts? Payments? Data editing? Multiple logins into the same account? Then it should handle races and transaction properly...
That said, it's true that they can be rare, and might be less worth it (engineering or time wise) than just letting it go.
For an app with like a few thousands users or internal use, the odds might be small.
But a fairly standard web app might serve 1M, or 10M or 100s of millions of people, and they deserve better.
So less features and slower performance to account for the hypothetical case where someone tries to edit their user account from 50 devices at once over and over again?
> But a fairly standard web app might serve 1M, or 10M or 100s of millions of people
You are talking about less than 0.5% of revenue generating SaaS apps.
I'd argue you should be aware of the transactions and isolations levels exist, like many things, but having to recite them in an interview situation is a different ballgame.
Otherwise, you end up in the situation where every second person has a different set of pet skills and you can't hire anyone because they need to know all the skills perfectly.
But it depends on what you're doing and your market. I've worked with people who took a pay cuts to go work for FAANG, after several interviews which they've studied for but I've decided it's not really needed when you're just writing a little in house CRUD webapp.
