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Comment by Trasmatta | Hacker News Reader

This also just came up recently at my company, that we should maybe rewrite because our technology hurts us in terms of recruiting... I'm not sure the people considering that realize how costly that decision would be. Is it really worth the millions and millions it would cost to rewrite into something considered more sexy? Probably multiple years of incremental work to get it done, and a massive hit to developer productivity and maintenance costs along the way.

I'm also reminded of when Twitter claimed that it was Rails' fault that they didn't have better moderation tools. One of the most hilarious excuses I've ever heard.

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I bought a gps app several years ago after testing it out on my phone. It had everything I wanted and was fast and smooth on my phone. Next year I wanted to use it for a long trip but then it was updated, they had rewritten it from scratch. Most of the functions I liked were gone and the thing was slow like I have never seen. Battery drain was big, the phone got scorching hot. Now after 8 years it still does not have all the functions it had when I bought it and it's still too slow to be used even after changing to faster phone a couple of times.

And still people are so fast to convert to latest frameworks and do complete rewrites. Most of the time recreating bugs they thought they got rid of many years ago. Or just make loads of new bugs. Or make it so slow on old phones that it can't be used any more.

Probably they decided to ditch their native app for a cross-platform web based resource hog.

Yeah, think they said it was an electron app now.

Evernote is pretty much ruined for me because of this. From a lovely, snappy native app to an electron monstrosity that's slow and barely usable.

Lucky for them their only competitor is Notion, another slow js app.

Anything that was reliable in up-time suddenly becomes legacy I guess. It also forces Cloud Service Providers to pivot to supporting the new flashy solutions, and suddenly "old faithful solution" ends up looking like the old frail man in the corner. It's a never ending lesson in building sand castles...

I think Silicon Valley illustrated this concept best. Just posted this clip a day ago to my twitter, so I too have felt the searing pain of being an IT architect and watching the right solution decisions get snowplowed - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySDX02WD0og

You left out the most important part. Sexy is a moving target. By the time your multiple years of incremental work moving it over are done, the new technology will be old and unsexy. Heck, in some cases the very fact that you(uncool company) use it will cause it to be unsexy.

Well, it depends on your goals.

Recruiting cheaper programmers will probably look nice on immediate results for a time, assuming the rewrite progresses well.

Whether the flood of bootcamp grads which, thanks to law of large numbers, will also contain a lot more bad choices and overwhelm your filtering ability, be actually good stewards for continued existence of things possibly critical to the business... is a completely different thing.

> Recruiting cheaper programmers will probably look nice on immediate results for a time, assuming the rewrite progresses well.

Possibly, but on the other hand, "adding more developers to a late project just makes it more late".

It all just feels like a colossal rathole to me. I'm feeling exhausted just thinking about it.

Possibly, but on the other hand, management usually sees this as a success story for HR ("Managed to fill every spot in days"), and a failure on the dev team ("The project slipped by months, despite getting all the people they asked for")

The not so hidden assumption that came with the pitch was that a bunch of the well-paid senior staff would leave for greener pastures (they wouldn't stick to maintaining a "legacy" stack). The savings were coming from both incoming and outgoing flow...

Or alternatively, there are some senior staff that are just plain bored with the current stack, and want the chance to play with something more exciting to them. Both are possibilities, depending on where the idea is originating.

I’m guilty of doing this at my current company.

I am a creative builder. There’s something inspiring about building things in a new format, the same way an artist might explore art in a new medium.

I get frustrated with the parts of the company that use “technology X” because it’s a “core competency.” I’d be more accepting of this argument if I didn’t notice a strong correlation between proponents of this strategy and people who often do bare minimum maintenance, purely market request driven, nothing inspiring or innovative or game changing. Then competitor does something cool next door and tue blame game starts as the pink slips issue.

Evolve or die.

There is of course the flip side of this coin, and the yen-yang of balance is what makes for the best strategy.

>Evolve or die.

The value in one's application is the domain specific part (the product). By switching the tools, which almost always are created outside of one's organization, you don't enhance your product.

With each rewrite you risk the advantages of your existing product and you will still be a consumer of third party language/framework, just another one yet without experience.

One interesting outcome of Twitter's claim was other startups moving away from Rails towards other stacks.

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