A message for professionals in the field of technology

Any technology is just an enabler. Techies should put more time into gaining clarity about the technologies that they work on, to utilize their true potential.

At Viral Fission, I am actively hiring various tech profiles. In the last 2-3 months, I interviewed several candidates. I was amazed by the kind of knowledge this young generation has about different technologies.

But, I found that many of the candidates lacked a basic understanding of the technologies. They can write code or adopt a method, but they won’t be able to judge whether that is the correct method or not.

A simple example is MongoDB-related questions. Almost all of the candidates told me that MongoDB is much faster and performs better than other database technologies.

But, when I asked them how, they mentioned some online studies that backed this claim. But they were not able to explain how MongoDB can process the queries faster than relational DBs.

MongoDB has differentiating features like the ability to add sub-documents and add nested indexes to those sub-documents.

E.g User Notifications can be stored as an array of subdocuments under the User document. So, when I try to access the notification data of the user, to the DB, I have to query only one document.

Whereas in relational DB, all users’ notifications are stored in one table. So, when my code tries to access the same notifications from a relational DB, it has to go through all the rows in the User Notifications table and get the matching rows.

In MongoDB, if the developer creates a separate collection for User Notification instead of adding a sub-document, the developer is not using the true power of MongoDB. Because in this case, MongoDB has to go through all the documents in the User Notification collection and return the matching documents. Of course, the developer must take care of MongoDB’s 16MB/document restriction.

The important lesson here is that technology is just an enabler. But, if we don’t understand the basics of it, we won’t see the desired results.

Developers need to go beyond the knowledge gained from StackOverflow and similar forums. Get deeper knowledge of why a particular technology can do better than others. This way they will be able to judge which technology will be better for a particular use case.