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Choose Boring Technology (2015)

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Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#61

Post by addicted »

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…

The blog isn’t really an argument against MongoDB however.

In many ways it’s an argument for MongoDB considering if you’ve built a JS based application MongoDB minimizes any additional learning and having to translate between the objects on the front end and in the backend. Non relational DBs are also easier to scale horizontally without requiring any application changes.

The OP is an argument against introducing new technology without a significant clear benefit. It’s basically saying that simply having a new tech can add significant complexity, unknown unknowns, and require much more maintenance and other costs.

So if your web application is currently running on MongoDB and it’s running well then this is an argument to stick to MongoDB instead of say migrating to postgresql going forward.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#63

Post by Nextgrid »

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…

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 on catering to investor’s wet dreams than actually solving business problems, and “engineering playgrounds” with 3 different programming languages, microservices, AI & blockchain netting them a 5-figure monthly AWS bill is something that appears to please investors more than a rock-solid, “boring” backend. Maybe the complex architecture succeeds at obfuscating the fact there’s no business model nor plans for one?

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#64

Post by twic »

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 many engineering managers can spot the common situation "the engineers are bored and they're rewriting perfectly-good codebases in Common Lisp and OCAML for funsies"? And how many know what to do about it when they see it?

I think there is a tension between this kind of actively guiding anti-complexity management and hiring "top talent".

The very best developers are capable, and avoid complexity. The next best developers are capable, and love complexity. The worst developers are not capable.

There aren't enough of the very best developers for a company to plan around hiring only those. So, if you want to hire developers who are at least capable, you have to give them some leeway to make things overcomplicated. Yes, that incurs a real cost to the business. You can think of that as just being another part of their compensation package.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#65

Post by aidos »

jacquesm wrote: post #21
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.

It’s hard enough managing code complexity in software projects; introducing tooling into the stack that exacerbates the issues is definitely a large own goal.

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#68

Post by nickjj »

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…

I think it's helpful if it brings awareness to the situation.

I've spoken with 70+ different devs working on 70+ different projects of all sizes on my Running in Production podcast[0] and the choose boring tech phrase came up a whole bunch of times, and especially the idea of using innovation tokens. If it helps folks build and ship their app in a quick and stable way, that seems like a big win to me.

[0]: https://runninginproduction.com/podcast/

Re: Choose Boring Technology (2015)

#69

Post by agumonkey »

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 seems companies have emergent human emotions, we all do the same, 'worry too much then trust and forget' rather than go gradual and long term.
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