Comment by signal11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by signal11 | Hacker News Reader

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> You'll get it when you make it to true Senior level :)

This and the following lines have so many opinions presented as truisms, it’s difficult to take the poster seriously.

2-4 “senior” devs were spending time on tech-only features without delivering actual end-user / business features. Ookay. Seems like a failure of engineering management, but let’s press forward.

2-4 engineers replaced with 1 “true Senior” engineer, who rewrote the microservices nightmare into a monolith powered by Spring. And he had C Suite backing for this. All’s well now.

I mean, that’s a great result. But it feels like there’s also some great people/motivation backstory we’re not getting. Also, maybe lessons from a one-person monolith don’t apply everywhere, even if that monolith serves millions of users?

You don't have to take me serious to derive value from the post. It's obvious anecdotal, just shares a story. I skipped some of the details to focus on the topic of Spring. But I think I can add some as you have rightly spotted they are missing: The major problem was imho indeed engineering management of that specific team, which was also swapped out at the same time I was put on the team (which was before we got the buy in to rewrite it). There were actually at least two dev generations of the team building the software before ours. The first one caused the most damage by the demented infrastructure decisions, while the second iteration was not able to successfully challenge that, even though they had the right ideas already. New engineering management was awesome in that they supported devs with most of our radical ideas, but also pulled in resources from other departments to help deal with the largest pain points such as adding Spring Boot quite early in the mending journey, with the heavy lifting being done by an expert from another team temporarily joining us.

Forgive my judgy wordings in the direction of seniority...our org has (had?) an issue where complexity is rewarded over simplicity. Some senior people here all they could do is build something so clusterfucked noone can understand it. Funnily enough, this project was originally launched to replace a legacy system noone was able to (or unwilling to) maintain.

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