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Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

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Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#31

Post by rgoulter »

manigandham wrote: post #16
willio58 wrote: post #2

You have to toe the line a bit in startups, you want to use proven technology but leave room for the employees to feel like they are contributing to something new and unique.

Why? I would advise finding better employees who respond to contributing to a solid business, and in return their own paychecks and bonuses.

I'd think that one of the advantages of working at a startup compared to a more 'corporate' company is the increased autonomy. If you don't get more creativity over the solution, working in bigcorp surely has more advantages.

I also think the "sense of ownership" part that comes with making decisions like that is important. With a startup, it's beneficial if contributors feel they're able to fix problems they see proactively.

But, yes, I don't want to work with hype-driven or resume-driven coworkers. Yes, I want the choices to be pragmatic and well-considered.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#32

Post by tluyben2 »

jrott wrote: post #7
willio58 wrote: post #2

You have to toe the line a bit in startups, you want to use proven technology but leave room for the employees to feel like they are contributing to something new and unique.

It's such a difficult line to toe. Especially because people like working with new technology and it does seem to help with recruiting even if it makes actually operating the business harder.

Some people like working with new tech; in my experience most do it not because they like it but because of their resume. I like how I can get really good, cheap and experienced devs for ‘non hip’ tech because they do not want to work with new tech, they want to improve their skill on what they know; java/spring, c#/asp, django etc with jquery/bootstrap. Resume driven/recruiting forces them into all the new stuff but they rather take a pay-cut to work with the stuff they know and are good at. I need stability in software and my teams over the years; the continues race for the latest and greatest helps me do nothing for my business (making profit that is), including recruiting. Quite the opposite in fact.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#33

Post by d-sc »

jungletime wrote: post #30

Had a $4 mouse from the dollar store. Watched some youtube videos, and decided to splurge and bought the latest and greatest bleeding-edge Mx master 3, at $129 and 3225% more expensive. Despite all the great reviews and hype. I'm kind of hating it. Damn thing is so heavy. It feels like I'm moving a brick around. Was going to return it, but now I'm saving it for a protest.

I have $300+ in Apple mouse and trackpads connected to my computer but I still find myself using the $30 dell mouse that I got as a backup.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#34

Post by felipemnoa »

jungletime wrote: post #30

Had a $4 mouse from the dollar store. Watched some youtube videos, and decided to splurge and bought the latest and greatest bleeding-edge Mx master 3, at $129 and 3225% more expensive. Despite all the great reviews and hype. I'm kind of hating it. Damn thing is so heavy. It feels like I'm moving a brick around. Was going to return it, but now I'm saving it for a protest.

>>It feels like I'm moving a brick around. Was going to return it, but now I'm saving it for a protest.

I thought it was still bumble bee tuna.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#35

Post by ZephyrBlu »

jungletime wrote: post #30

Had a $4 mouse from the dollar store. Watched some youtube videos, and decided to splurge and bought the latest and greatest bleeding-edge Mx master 3, at $129 and 3225% more expensive. Despite all the great reviews and hype. I'm kind of hating it. Damn thing is so heavy. It feels like I'm moving a brick around. Was going to return it, but now I'm saving it for a protest.

The weight is something I love about MX Masters.

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#36

Post by meowface »

Sophistifunk wrote: post #21

Seems to be this article is about when your product is bleeding-edge tech, but people are commenting as if it were about building your product using bleeding-edge tech (in-house or otherwise). Definitely only do one of these at a time, tho :)

Yeah, it's kind of like the classic "break one law at a time" rule. If you're hauling drugs, don't speed. Getting away with just the one thing is hard enough.

I think Discord is one good example of this sort of trade-off. Single, pretty standard type of app that improves on its predecessors, with some bleeding-edge engineering: https://blog.discord.com/why-discord-is-switching-from-go-to...

>Discord has never been afraid of embracing new technologies that look promising. For example, we were early adopters of Elixir, React, React Native, and Scylla. If a piece of technology is promising and gives us an advantage, we do not mind dealing with the inherent difficulties and instability of the bleeding edge. This is one of the ways we’ve quickly reached 250+ million users with less than 50 engineers.

>Embracing the new async features in Rust nightly is another example of our willingness to embrace new, promising technology. As an engineering team, we decided it was worth using nightly Rust and we committed to running on nightly until async was fully supported on stable. Together we dealt with any problems that arose and at this point Rust stable supports asynchronous Rust. The bet paid off.

(They also mention how they're careful to replace decoupled components incrementally, and only where it addresses a real need, rather than for the fun of it.)

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#37

Post by sgtnoodle »

viraptor wrote: post #23
Fordec wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just getting hardware upgraded from very early 2000s PICs to ARM chips has been a pretty big win for me

That sounds like a huge jump! Now I'm curious what kind of solutions where PIC is viable isn't an overkill on Arm? (Or are there really tiny Arms?)

Low end cortex-m cores are pretty cheap these days. More modern designs and processes use silicon more efficiently, so you get more capability for the same raw material cost. Also, you can do a surprising amount with an 8-bit MCU. Lots of very capable 3D printers still run on AVR based controllers. Often times, you're limited by peripherals or memory size more than raw CPU speed.

As a baseline, it's relatively easy to make an autonomous aircraft that follows GPS waypoints using an atmega328 and have CPU cycles to spare, even using software floating point math everywhere. All the open source drone firmwares recently dropped support for orders of magnitude more powerful cortex-m3 flight controllers, though, and are encouraging folk to migrate to cortex-m7 based controllers. That's crazy! Software tends to expand to fill up any available volume over time...

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#38

Post by thejosh »

jungletime wrote: post #30

Had a $4 mouse from the dollar store. Watched some youtube videos, and decided to splurge and bought the latest and greatest bleeding-edge Mx master 3, at $129 and 3225% more expensive. Despite all the great reviews and hype. I'm kind of hating it. Damn thing is so heavy. It feels like I'm moving a brick around. Was going to return it, but now I'm saving it for a protest.

Also only had random $5-$10 microsoft basic mice since like the early 2000s, changed to gaming mice and didn't like any of them, and my last trial the mouse broke after a few weeks (logitech g pro).

Re: Bleeding-edge tech will kill your startup

#39

Post by neltnerb »

Fordec wrote: post #19
sgtnoodle wrote: post #17

Lol. I'm an embedded engineer, and this week I'm getting my coworkers excited to upgrade part of our system to use bleeding edge technology from the mid 90's!

Just getting hardware upgraded from very early 2000s PICs to ARM chips has been a pretty big win for me

Ah, I had the good fortune to at least run through Atmels with C compilers first ;-)

I definitely never expect to use a PIC or Atmel chip though, wow those were terrible. I guess small quantities really hurt.

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