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Choose Boring Technology (2015)

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Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#291

Post by astura »

eloff wrote: post #247
Nextgrid wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of a lot of tech companies, the entire market is broken and leads to weird incentives rarely seen in any other industry: companies that aren’t profitable, don’t have a real product people pay for, don’t have a clear, plausible path to profitability and yet somehow stay in business because investors are happy to burn money. This completely reverses the typical market dynamics. The company is more focused o…

I don't buy this theory, because I don't think there are many investors that actually care about the tech stack. If they are, I'd say they're bad investors. You could create a successful company on any tech stack. It's really like trying to invest in a company based on the way they decorate their HQ. Does it matter at all? Maybe only if it's ridiculously extravagant compared to their revenue.

>I'd say they're bad investors.

No argument from me there.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#292

Post by oblio »

sprkwd wrote: post #59
threeseed wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern cars are far more efficient, performant and easier to drive than a 15 year one. Just like modern web apps are far more scalable, highly-available, secure and performant then they were 15 years ago.

It’s easier to fix 15+ Year old cars yourself.

It's also much easier to die in 15+ years old car.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#293

Post by blackrock »

vvanders wrote: post #143
rachelbythebay wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a really common pattern in gamedev too. Median career is something like ~3 years so those that stick around are okay with the crunch and other shitty parts of the industry. Combine that with gatekeeping/I did my time you have to do yours and not much has changed there over the years.

What’s the pay like for senior games engineers?

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#294

Post by jay_kyburz »

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…

TIL: Complect: To join by weaving or twining together; interweave.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#295

Post by lanius »

threeseed wrote: post #35
Svip wrote: post #32

This is why I prefer buying 15+ year old cars, you know everything that's wrong with them. OK, it just so happens that three cars I've owned has been over 15 years old when I bought them, but I haven't heard a good car analogy in a while.

Modern cars are far more efficient, performant and easier to drive than a 15 year one. Just like modern web apps are far more scalable, highly-available, secure and performant then they were 15 years ago.

>Modern cars are far more efficient, performant and easier to drive than a 15 year one

Can you clarify what being "easier to drive" means?

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#296

Post by gilbetron »

jmartrican wrote: post #91

The way I see it is that one should master their stack. If you work over and over again with the same stack you will know it well. You will be able to move mountains with it. But it takes years to arrive to that. It takes implementing multiple projects the same way over and over again. You need the wherewithal to stick with your stack and not get lured away. Maybe this is what boring means. Maybe boring is different…

This is a great comment and is spot on. Mastery has exponential returns over proficiency. The best thing is that mastery feels really good once you have it. I've been bouncing around the past several years not finding what I want, but I've realized the past year that I want to have the mastery with a stack that I haven't since my C/C++ OpenGL computer graphics years.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#297

Post by jariel »

One thing missing from the essay:

If you hire people that are more interested in solving the problem, then they are the tech ... the problem goes away.

Using some 'fancy, risk new thing' has utterly no appeal to someone trying to do XYZ by a certain time with a certain quality.

This is one of the biggest dissonances between Eng. and many business roles.

I've personally gone through the 'perspective shift' over my career, and I don't want to look at my younger self as desperately naive, but really it looks that way from a business perspective.

Even doing Engineering now, I generally could care less about the tech, and that makes you think very differently about it. I almost cringe the moment someone brings up something weird. The risk is of course being the 'crusty naysayer' but in most cases, it makes sense. New Tech is still in R&D, unless there is something very specifically and overwhelmingly advantageous to that tech with regards to your business, it's just a risk. To Zoom ... Mongo, Rust and Scala probably are not there yet in terms of the obvious advantages, whereas a new video codec might might meet the threshold of 'we have to look at this'.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#298

Post by closeparen »

chrischapman wrote: post #75

The aviation industry has an expression: "there are old pilots and there are bold pilots but there are no old bold pilots". Young, inexperienced pilots often take unnecessary risks and occasionally learn important lessons - sometimes terrifying lessons. Those lessons lead to a more cautious approach to flying as they grow older. It seems to me that boring tech is equivalent to cautious flying. Experience matters. May…

I thought this was supposed to mean that the bold pilots died.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#299

Post by xorcist »

lumost wrote: post #272
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…

It's a mixed bag, if you hire engineers who exclusively want to refine the existing toolchain - you may find that solving new product problems becomes more difficult. You may get stuck with an ancient oracle stack drawing down your entire companies profit margin. Or the team responsible for some technology has ossified so heavily that your launch date is moved to twenty never. You can immediately spot a misaligned en…

> engineering culture when every team has its own tech stack

Isn't this literally one of the more common arguments for microservice architecture?

It empowers teams to choose the right tool for the job, i.e. run their own tech stack.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#300

Post by jjeaff »

eloff wrote: post #247
Nextgrid wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of a lot of tech companies, the entire market is broken and leads to weird incentives rarely seen in any other industry: companies that aren’t profitable, don’t have a real product people pay for, don’t have a clear, plausible path to profitability and yet somehow stay in business because investors are happy to burn money. This completely reverses the typical market dynamics. The company is more focused o…

I don't buy this theory, because I don't think there are many investors that actually care about the tech stack. If they are, I'd say they're bad investors. You could create a successful company on any tech stack. It's really like trying to invest in a company based on the way they decorate their HQ. Does it matter at all? Maybe only if it's ridiculously extravagant compared to their revenue.

I have had it be an issue with investors during the due diligence phase. We were very far along in the fund raising process when we got to the technical due diligence. They brought in an expert advisor to discuss our tech stack and he seemed very concerned that we were building on a php/mysql stack.

They pretty much ghosted us soon after that meeting. Though they did not specify that as the reason, it seems most likely that their advisor told them we don't know what we are doing technically.

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