Choose Boring Technology (2015) • Hacker News Board

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#21

Post by jacquesm » Sun, Feb 21, 2021, 10:00 AM UTC

phendrenad2 wrote: post #2

I always found it funny that companies will go to extreme Herculean lengths to hire the best programmers, and are incredibly fearful and paranoid that they could be making a "bad hire", and yet once hired they don't spend a second making sure engineers aren't completely running the software product off the rails and killing the company internally. The author mentions trying to rewrite Etsy's backend in Scala and Mong…

My main recipe for crisis management when a company is about to go off the rails or if it has already happened: cut down on complexity. 9 out of 10 times that's enough to get things moving again. Highly frustrating that we keep making these mistakes over and over again without ever learning from them. Complexity has a price, you should only spend it if you really need it.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#22

Post by hnedeotes » Sun, Feb 21, 2021, 10:01 AM UTC

wrnr wrote: post #18

This stack can be radically simplified: Apache: managing open connections. Memcache: holding stuff in memory. Postgresql: Save stuff to disk. Cron: Schedule things. Python: wire the above things together ... or a good reason the pick Go or Java

Or better, Elixir + Postgresql

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#23

Post by ithkuil » Sun, Feb 21, 2021, 10:11 AM UTC

arkitaip wrote: post #12

trestenhortz wrote: post #3

Generalizations like “choose boring technology” are just unhelpful slogans. Truth is you should choose technology given consideration of its pros and cons, not on the basis of some slogan. There are very good reasons to use mature technologies and very good reasons to use current technologies and very good reasons to use absolute cutting edge technologies. When someone comes at your approach wielding a slogan, be ske…

The author even addresses your criticism, i.e. how the title of the talk makes people focus on the wrong detail level of his thesis...

Should "chose boring titles" be a thing?

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#24

Post by jeromenerf » Sun, Feb 21, 2021, 10:12 AM UTC

the_gipsy wrote: post #17

I think there's an unfairness angle to it, if someone like the CTO makes the "boring" call. He then hacks maybe a few things here and there, but the one's to "sucker up" are the devs who have to program some "boring" shitty tech every day.

In my experience "boring" is less correlated to "shitty tech" than poor organization.

Most dev work is "blue collar" work, following top down business decisions. The opportunities for devs to push impactful bottom up projects for a company business are rare at best.

I have always preferred organizations where business problems-to-solve were pushed top-down rather than executive decisions. It encourages business understanding, initiatives and ownership.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#25

Post by roenxi » Sun, Feb 21, 2021, 10:15 AM UTC

phendrenad2 wrote: post #2

I always found it funny that companies will go to extreme Herculean lengths to hire the best programmers, and are incredibly fearful and paranoid that they could be making a "bad hire", and yet once hired they don't spend a second making sure engineers aren't completely running the software product off the rails and killing the company internally. The author mentions trying to rewrite Etsy's backend in Scala and Mong…

They are fearful and paranoid of making a bad hire because they don't know how to assess whether the engineer is destroying the company from the inside.

If there was a reliable general algorithm to make good software managers would hire lousy engineers then tell them to execute the algorithm. There isn't, they can't. The fallback is to be as picky as possible about who has influence on the software.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#26

Post by solanav » Sun, Feb 21, 2021, 10:20 AM UTC

I can understand this from the perspective of a manager or company owner. "Happiness comes from shipping products" or "Choose boring technology" make a lot of sense if you are maximizing profit and don't need to work with the tech yourself.

If you are an engineer and you want to try a new technology, go for it. Even if it doesn't make sense. Learn new things, don't stick with the boring tech. Maximize your own happiness and your own knowledge, not the profit of your higher-ups.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#27

Post by bottled_poe » Sun, Feb 21, 2021, 10:20 AM UTC

Lots of good stuff in this article. The way I read this is that all technology choices boil down to business cases which attempt to predict costs and benefits. I think it is important to note that the pros and cons which get weighed up in such a situation will cut across all aspects of a project - not just hard aspects (eg. Functional needs, performance, complexity, technology maturity, etc) but also importantly soft aspects like compatibility of the technology with team culture, individual personalities, career objectives, etc. It’s a complex problem and assessing the value of each pro/con is mastery which I believe requires a vast amount of knowledge and experience.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#28

Post by rachelbythebay » Sun, Feb 21, 2021, 10:28 AM UTC

phendrenad2 wrote: post #2

I always found it funny that companies will go to extreme Herculean lengths to hire the best programmers, and are incredibly fearful and paranoid that they could be making a "bad hire", and yet once hired they don't spend a second making sure engineers aren't completely running the software product off the rails and killing the company internally. The author mentions trying to rewrite Etsy's backend in Scala and Mong…

How about “leaves the industry rather than have to use terrible things at dumb companies”, thus giving a survival bias that selects for shiny. I know I feel that way about a lot of stuff now.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#29

Post by linspace » Sun, Feb 21, 2021, 10:32 AM UTC

trestenhortz wrote: post #3

Generalizations like “choose boring technology” are just unhelpful slogans. Truth is you should choose technology given consideration of its pros and cons, not on the basis of some slogan. There are very good reasons to use mature technologies and very good reasons to use current technologies and very good reasons to use absolute cutting edge technologies. When someone comes at your approach wielding a slogan, be ske…

Yes, specially since different people will have different ideas of what is experimental and what not. Python is boring tech at this point for most people, but not everyone maybe using SAS for data analysis or Java for backend. You will need to evaluate case by case if it makes sense or not to change that stack, there is no silver bullet.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#30

Post by threeseed » Sun, Feb 21, 2021, 10:40 AM UTC

tpetry wrote: post #5

The problem with the non-boring technology club is that programmers see what problem FAANG companies are solving and wanting to be on the edge on new technology too. But they don‘t have the same problems. Another problem is they want to show what they can do. If they tell in an interview they are working with rails/django and a postgresql database they fear they look incompetent using those old technologies. So they…

Basecamp is a simple app though. Ridiculously simple.

That app could have been written in the mid-1990s using WebObjects in just a few months.

Technologies like MongoDB, React, GraphQL, Microservices etc exist because modern, real-world apps are generally far more advanced than just a glorified CRUD app. Consumers simply have higher expectations and more demands for what web apps should be able to do.