Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the event you haven't already seen it, you may find this skit amusing and/or sob-inducing. https://youtu.be/y8OnoxKotPQ Ed: I'm an idiot.
Link?
Fixed. Oops!
Choose Boring Technology (2015)
301–310 of 374 posts
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The successful micro-service architectures I've seen have a remarkable level of uniformity. Many such environments have standards down to the level of use this particular http lib +internal wrapper.
At the end of the day there are not large enough differences between say ruby and python to justify different teams choosing ruby or python at the same (medium-sized) company. If you have this level of difference, you've effectively permanently engrained conway's law into your organization.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#303I 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.
yup I started my career and felt this way pretty quickly, I'm now trying to get a PhD instead, I love solving problems, so this seems like a good idea.
I'm sure there are some great companies out there, but they seem to be rare. I just see don't see work in this industry to be sustainable and I cant see myself working as a Software Engineer when I'm 30+ or with a family.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#304Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was very disappointed when I joined Amazon to learn we were using plain old Java with servlets (this was 2015, I think kotlin is more common now). Since leaving I’m in awe of how sensible the technical decision making that led to that was.
I interviewed with Stripe and one of the engineers mentioned they’re transitioning many services to a exciting new technology called... Java. That was in 2021
It seems like everyone in my current org is very against Java, somehow they'd rather build backend systems in JS. I'll never get it.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#305Earlier quoted context omitted.
Job hopping programmers are compensated for how rare their skill is and not how much value they add to the business. It’s another flaw in capitalism. Reward employees a direct and substantial cut of the profits and incentivize to them to stay 5-10 years and these behaviors should disappear. The loss of job security, frequent job hopping has created more incentives to optimize for the next job switch and not value add…
Why the downvotes? This comment’s dead accurate.
I am not sure about the down votes (no reason for them in my opinion) but the casual jab at capitalism looks gratuitous and does not help making the argument seem stronger.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#306Earlier quoted context omitted.
Although still new I'm wondering whether Kotlin could be admitted to the boring technology category given that it was built to dovetail with Java and has first class Spring support?
I’ve found kotlin to be wonderfully boring. There are definitely some sharp knives that get abused though. I’ve met a few people who want to throw OO in the bin and treat kotlin as pure FP to their detriment.
Isn't that a real option with Arrow?
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#307Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lots of good reasons to use NoSQL. All pretty much hang off what sort of data access pattern you need. If you have an application that retrieves an works on a top level entity then NoSQL fits very nicely. When you have a dataset that is shared and aggregate information is needed not so much and you are likely better of considering a SQL database of some sort.
> When you have a dataset that is shared and aggregate information is needed not so much and you are likely better of considering a SQL database of some sort. There are best practices for this. Simply create a microservice per table, and then create a microservice that acts as a client to the other services and aggregates or joins the data from those services. No, I'm not kidding. This is literally what people do and…
Is this a joke or people seriously do this?
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#308Earlier 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…
Job hopping programmers are compensated for how rare their skill is and not how much value they add to the business. It’s another flaw in capitalism. Reward employees a direct and substantial cut of the profits and incentivize to them to stay 5-10 years and these behaviors should disappear. The loss of job security, frequent job hopping has created more incentives to optimize for the next job switch and not value add…
I wouldn't say that that's a flaw in capitalism, it's just that one (skill rarity) is observable ex-ante, the other (value added) is only observable ex-post.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 like…
I've worked in over twenty languages in my career, and you can't pay me to work with PHP anymore, even though there was a brief period where I thought it was the best thing ever as a new programmer. But that's just an artist being picky about his tools.
What matters with a startup is executing, and that means using tools that let you execute well. If you're most familiar with PHP and MySQL, then that's what you should use.
As someone biased against your tech stack, I fully support your decision and think the expert and the investor have no idea what really matters, hence I stand by that they're a bad investor.
Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)
#310Earlier quoted context omitted.
Job hopping programmers are compensated for how rare their skill is and not how much value they add to the business. It’s another flaw in capitalism. Reward employees a direct and substantial cut of the profits and incentivize to them to stay 5-10 years and these behaviors should disappear. The loss of job security, frequent job hopping has created more incentives to optimize for the next job switch and not value add…
I wouldn't say that that's a flaw in capitalism, it's just that one (skill rarity) is observable ex-ante, the other (value added) is only observable ex-post.
If people stayed longer in jobs then they could be held accountable long enough into the future.