Choose Boring Technology
boringtechnology.club
Choose Boring Technology
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Re: Choose Boring Technology
#2Discussed at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9291215
Re: Choose Boring Technology
#3Another case of someone discovering, after 10+ years in tech, that code is a liability and you're supposed to solve problems instead of chasing trends and padding the resume.
Great that he's spreading the word!
Re: Choose Boring Technology
#4It seems like a lot of this is just the tension between what management wants to be focusing on (big picture product or business-level questions) vs what it makes sense for individual engineers to be focusing their efforts on.
As an individual contributor, it's vitally important to keep up with new technologies in order to remain employable. Maybe that isn't in fact the best strategy for your current job, but it's crucial to getting your next job.
Put another way, there are probably a lot of businesses that sensibly standardized on ColdFusion in the early 2000s. Engineers who buckled down and focused on "So what’s your company trying to do?" using CFML could easily find themselves in a really bad spot--unless they were also sacrificing their home life to teach themselves something else.
Re: Choose Boring Technology
#5There's a longer term issue that appears to be missing here.
At what point do you change? There must be a point otherwise we'd all be here writing COBOL/CICS with some whizzy Javascript interface library.
Over time it becomes harder and harder and more and more expensive to maintain old technology. Because frankly maintaining old technology is pretty boring and career destroying so you need to be paid more and more to do it.
The marginal benefit of the new shiny is indeed an overhead you should try and avoid, but also you have to dodge the trap of being stuck in a technology when everybody else has moved on.
Anyway back to the Adabas support...
Re: Choose Boring Technology
#6There's a longer term issue that appears to be missing here. At what point do you change? There must be a point otherwise we'd all be here writing COBOL/CICS with some whizzy Javascript interface library. Over time it becomes harder and harder and more and more expensive to maintain old technology. Because frankly maintaining old technology is pretty boring and career destroying so you need to be paid more and more t…
Well you can sit down and do the maths; you mention Cobol, which you can actually map to the cost and availability of developers. The cost of that technological choice just keeps growing and growing. You can compare that to the cost of converting it to e.g. Java (and multiply that cost by 2-5x because it's very hard to make an accurate guess).
This goes for all technological choices. The cost is not static, but varies over time depending on market forces.
Re: Choose Boring Technology
#7There's a longer term issue that appears to be missing here. At what point do you change? There must be a point otherwise we'd all be here writing COBOL/CICS with some whizzy Javascript interface library. Over time it becomes harder and harder and more and more expensive to maintain old technology. Because frankly maintaining old technology is pretty boring and career destroying so you need to be paid more and more t…
Well you can sit down and do the maths; you mention Cobol, which you can actually map to the cost and availability of developers. The cost of that technological choice just keeps growing and growing. You can compare that to the cost of converting it to e.g. Java (and multiply that cost by 2-5x because it's very hard to make an accurate guess). This goes for all technological choices. The cost is not static, but varie…
If everybody stayed with the boring tech, cobol developers would be abundant and cheap.
Re: Choose Boring Technology
#8There's a longer term issue that appears to be missing here. At what point do you change? There must be a point otherwise we'd all be here writing COBOL/CICS with some whizzy Javascript interface library. Over time it becomes harder and harder and more and more expensive to maintain old technology. Because frankly maintaining old technology is pretty boring and career destroying so you need to be paid more and more t…
2-3 years after you read it on Hackernews is a good rule of thumb.
Re: Choose Boring Technology
#9There's a longer term issue that appears to be missing here. At what point do you change? There must be a point otherwise we'd all be here writing COBOL/CICS with some whizzy Javascript interface library. Over time it becomes harder and harder and more and more expensive to maintain old technology. Because frankly maintaining old technology is pretty boring and career destroying so you need to be paid more and more t…
You never change, at some point a competitor arises that chose different technology and it kills you.
Re: Choose Boring Technology
#10There's a longer term issue that appears to be missing here. At what point do you change? There must be a point otherwise we'd all be here writing COBOL/CICS with some whizzy Javascript interface library. Over time it becomes harder and harder and more and more expensive to maintain old technology. Because frankly maintaining old technology is pretty boring and career destroying so you need to be paid more and more t…
Adabas brought back memories. And now when I see all the hype about NoSQL, I'm remember Shirley Bassey's fantastic song - 'History Repeating'