Comment by midrus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by midrus | Hacker News Reader

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I've already have had a good bunch of similar experiences at previous companies, where you hear all the time "we're moving away from the monolith". Problem is after you've been hearing for 5+ years, it probably means it will never go away. This particular company ended up with 100s of "microservices" around it, first in Elixir, then Elixir went out of favor so they started rewriting in Go, then came GraphQL so some microservices were serving GraphQL while others stuck with REST, then different frontends in React, some with Redux, then redux was not the current trend so MobX, then MobX was not cool because now it was all hooks, then some moved to Next.js because of course nobody understood our custom in house webpack setup. Now I've heard they're moving to Svelte.

I honestly don't see how that can be better than sticking to Rails/Laravel/Django and embrace the monolith. All this madness of building things at every single company as if it were Netflix or Amazon is an insane waste of resources. Some days I feel like we (engineers) are like kids playing with the toys we want to play with rather than be solving real business problems and maintaining our projects in good shape technically speaking.

Sounds horrendously unproductive. Did they not measure the productivity?

You can’t unless you’re a decent programmer and only when you don’t think you’re 100x yourself

Otherwise it’s insanely hard to measure, bc people will come up with bs about how difficulty, complexity, test coverage, change management, dependencies.

People complain about car maintenance and the plumber, but programmers are worse.. you simply have to believe they’re working on magic… bc, we’ll, you wouldn’t understand right?

I hear what you're saying but surely it's a responsibility of the tech leadership (and even the non-technical leadership to some extent) i.e. simple questions such as 'surely it shouldn't take this long to ship a simple feature?' or 'why is everything so complex and ever-changing?'

You don't understand, it's different today with all the micrososervices, packages, toolchain, kubernetes, docker, cloud, security, product management isn't clear, they change too often, it impacts all the code, we'll have to test everything again, this isn't php, compiling takes ages, we need faster machines with 128gb ram, it's complex because we need to be flexible, otherwise it will take ages when we want to add anything in the future, and we don't want to rewrite the whole codebase in the future, we spend all our time refactoring, the ops guys running the database aren't doing their job - that's why things are slow, not because we don't understand sql, the customer always makes user errors and we have to solve their problems, we need to do more peer programming,

bla bla bla bla bla.. It's just bs by incompetent and deceitful people

Hahaha, you sound like my standup meetings XDD

I had a coworker which was the most useless developer ever, not able to do absolutely anything by himself and totally unsure about everything. But given it was a big company it was easy for him to "hide" and rely on just showing up for meetings, talking to everyone, etc.

Then he was the first one to ask for raises, despite he was earning way, way, way more than he should already.

Then one day he came complaining that the mechanic wanted to charge him X for fixing his car and that it was too much and how could that be possible, etc, etc.....I just couldn't believe it.

They measured it by the number of Jira tasks moved to "done".

The problem is, nobody is asking if those Jira tasks could have been avoided, or be a lot smaller if we were working on a more productive stack.

At the end of the day product managers get used to everything taking a lot of time and assume that's the only way (which, to be honest, in this context it is... as reached this point it is very difficult to go back).

And also, when productivity was discussed... there was always someone suggesting the problem was the current "legacy" stack (i.e. React, Elixir) and that we should instead move to this other new stack to be more productive (Go, Svelte) and there we go again...

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