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Vertical integration is the only thing that matters

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Re: Vertical integration is the only thing that matters

#11

Post by pippy360 »

jamesdutc wrote: post #4

I just could not disagree more. This kind of rigid, singular view of operational workflows based on precomposed automations not only constantly break but also inevitably introduce huge inefficiences. I posted a longer comment on lobste.rs: https://lobste.rs/s/azpsqe/vertical_integration_is_only_thin...

yes! couldn't agree more with your long post. Especially this part: "(This is exacerbated when components of the automation require internal-only tooling—the poor data scientist now needs to go read through a bunch of half-written, out-of-date documentation about tools they simply don't care about to do a task that is not a core responsibility for them.)"

"Vertical integration" in my experience has just been turning a group of simple tools into a complex monolith that no one understands and is extremely difficult to debug

Re: Vertical integration is the only thing that matters

#12

Post by vinceguidry »

jayd16 wrote: post #10
vinceguidry wrote: post #5

This article made me laugh and cry at the same time. I've spent so much time in my career trying to make things nice and seamless only to see my own team members throw out my careful work for something newer, shinier, and shittier. I was on a team that used Bazel. Like two devs took the time to figure out how it worked, everybody else just either worked around it or complained endlessly about it. I am now thoroughly…

Meh, I think its just hubris to ignore your users (in this case the rest of the team) and tell yourself they're just dumb for not using your clearly perfect system. There is a slight amount of NIH you have to fight, but for the most part, if a process is truly seamless, that NIH will get pushed to a different part of the stack that's more front of mind. The real issue is that you're trivializing needs that live outsi…

Ignore them? I did anything but. I know the new solution was shittier because I was the one who implemented it. Every single time. It never made my life better, only worse.

Re: Vertical integration is the only thing that matters

#13

Post by jamesdutc »

pippy360 wrote: post #11
jamesdutc wrote: post #4

I just could not disagree more. This kind of rigid, singular view of operational workflows based on precomposed automations not only constantly break but also inevitably introduce huge inefficiences. I posted a longer comment on lobste.rs: https://lobste.rs/s/azpsqe/vertical_integration_is_only_thin...

yes! couldn't agree more with your long post. Especially this part: "(This is exacerbated when components of the automation require internal-only tooling—the poor data scientist now needs to go read through a bunch of half-written, out-of-date documentation about tools they simply don't care about to do a task that is not a core responsibility for them.)" "Vertical integration" in my experience has just been turning…

It's also very easy to complain about how employees have résumé-focus in their approach to their work: “why should I bother to learn some internal-only tooling that I'll never use anywhere else (for a task that I don't really even care that much about…)?”

But, to borrow a line from Warren VanderBurgh's ‘Children of the Magenta’: “(in the industry) we created you like this.”

Another key flaw of precomposed automations for rigidly-defined work-flows is that they usually exist in precisely the circumstances that give rise to their own subversion. (I might even go so far as to suggest that the circumstances are the cause of both the mistake and the maladaptive behaviours that address the mistake…)

Ultimately, deep stacks of tightly-integrated components forming a precomposed automation that enacts some work-flow—“vertical integration” as the post frames it—is obvious enough that it seems every big company tries it… only to fail in basically the same ways every time.

Re: Vertical integration is the only thing that matters

#14

Post by bsder »

vinceguidry wrote: post #5

This article made me laugh and cry at the same time. I've spent so much time in my career trying to make things nice and seamless only to see my own team members throw out my careful work for something newer, shinier, and shittier. I was on a team that used Bazel. Like two devs took the time to figure out how it worked, everybody else just either worked around it or complained endlessly about it. I am now thoroughly…

> It's not that it's hard, what it is is brittle. A vertically-integrated stack, by its very nature, cannot survive forces that jostle it in the horizontal direction.

Is this not exactly the whole problem, though? Fault tolerance.

My chisel doesn't need to integrate with my hand plane which doesn't need to integrate with my band saw. One of them breaking doesn't break the others.

This is why experienced developers gravitate toward powerful tools that they trust deeply but that have extremely hard boundaries. It's why we're still stuck with ASCII text as the primary artifact for coding, for example. The moment we try to move off of that a single fault can bring down the whole house of cards.

Re: Vertical integration is the only thing that matters

#15

Post by crazygringo »

Unfortunately, I have to disagree.

On the one hand, the scenarios described by "vertical integration" sound like a paradise to use.

On the other hand, in real life it's going to far too complex, far too brittle, and ultimately unworkable to maintain.

Tool boundaries exist for a good reason -- so you can swap tools in and out easily, and the toolmakers can stay sane by focusing on doing one thing well. With vertical integration, nothing is swappable, because you can only use tools built for your specific architecture. You become isolated from the broader ecosystem, and locked into one.

And then, that architecture is going to be this bespoke thing that becomes so enormously complex and hard to work with that everybody just gives up. Because every time somebody wants to change a tool, it turns out to be 10x more work to figure out how to make the change work with this vertically-integrated architecture.

Vertical integration isn't the "only thing that matters". Flexibility and swappability matter too, as does saving time and money by following common industry technologies and not inventing a bunch of custom architecture if it's not your core product and not absolutely necessary.

Re: Vertical integration is the only thing that matters

#17

Post by vinceguidry »

bsder wrote: post #14
vinceguidry wrote: post #5

This article made me laugh and cry at the same time. I've spent so much time in my career trying to make things nice and seamless only to see my own team members throw out my careful work for something newer, shinier, and shittier. I was on a team that used Bazel. Like two devs took the time to figure out how it worked, everybody else just either worked around it or complained endlessly about it. I am now thoroughly…

> It's not that it's hard, what it is is brittle. A vertically-integrated stack, by its very nature, cannot survive forces that jostle it in the horizontal direction. Is this not exactly the whole problem, though? Fault tolerance. My chisel doesn't need to integrate with my hand plane which doesn't need to integrate with my band saw. One of them breaking doesn't break the others. This is why experienced developers gr…

It is but 90% of this horizontal pressure is just nonsense. Not actual faults that need to be tolerated. Cooler heads stick around and solve the problems, but by the time that happens, the larger dev community has already moved on to something thoroughly crappier.

ASCII is perhaps a poor example, all modern tooling is UTF-8 capable.

Re: Vertical integration is the only thing that matters

#18

Post by layoric »

vinceguidry wrote: post #5

This article made me laugh and cry at the same time. I've spent so much time in my career trying to make things nice and seamless only to see my own team members throw out my careful work for something newer, shinier, and shittier. I was on a team that used Bazel. Like two devs took the time to figure out how it worked, everybody else just either worked around it or complained endlessly about it. I am now thoroughly…

> The second you turn your head though, your fellow teammates will conspire to replatform onto Go or Rust or NodeJS or GitHub Actions and make everything miserable again.

Curious how would you use use Smalltalk in replace of GitHub Actions assuming you need a GitHub integrated CI runner?

Re: Vertical integration is the only thing that matters

#19

Post by walterbell »

vinceguidry wrote: post #7
azeirah wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily I work with laravel and that's a spiritual successor to rails. The development experience is almost always really smooth and there are more and more tools to further smoothen that experience every day. There are definitely better tools out there but given how the web ecosystem functions, it could be much worse.

The Rails experience of 15 years ago is still achievable, with Rails, today. It's even better if you can believe it. You just have to throw out the notion of SPA frameworks and be willing to actually learn how HTML / CSS works. I read an article here a month ago about how nobody's willing to do that. The deficiency in web standards that SPA frameworks were invented to resolve have all been fixed, there's nothing they…

What's a good doc or code template for SPA-free Rails?

What do you think of htmx + Rails?

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