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The last place I worked at will die because it will take them years to migrate from Oracle to postgres due to "technical debt" (the codebase is coupled with the
by Lewton 10y ago
The last place I worked at will die because it will take them years to migrate from Oracle to postgres due to "technical debt" (the codebase is coupled with the database to a hilarious degree; business logic in triggers, huge plsql packages, plain sql queries in the java codebase, halfassed homerolled ORM). They're not getting as many new customers as they could because, for various reasons, the Oracle licensing terms are now unacceptable for the new customers they have been in contact with over the last two years.
That's the most concrete reason I can come up with why the technical debt will kill them, but there's plenty of vaguer reasons why it's been killing them for the past 5 years and will finish them off over the next 5. The attrition rate have been around 20% a year since I joined. For most of the time I worked there they compensated somewhat by hiring new people. Word has gotten around though, and they've run out of qualified candidates willing to work on their mess. Hell, we even had a couple of gifted hires leave after a month or two while shaking their heads.
My current workplaces main product is using the same tech, is the same size (loc) and has the same functionality of the other company, but serving a different market. They did the oracle to postgres migration in 2 months. 2 MAN months, one guy.
New workplace: 15ish developers, serving the same amount of customers, doing similar revenue, making stable releases every week
Old workplace: 80 developers at its peak, doing non-hotfix releases around every 3 months. Just a mess in every way. Mostly stemmed from the codebase and the architectural choices that had been made along the way.
- msluyter 10y agoHey, sounds like we worked at the same place! That, or the "wedded to Oracle for life" is a common antipattern. I'd add "shared everything architecture" to the horrors. Yeah, once you get that deeply entrenched in Oracle, it's almost impossible to get away, and after that experience I vowed never to work at another Oracle shop.
- pjc50 10y agoOracle is a form of technical and financial debt all its own. I wasn't directly involved in but had a good view of our university's finance modernisation woes: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/1634558.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/1634558.stm https://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/reporter/2001-02/weekly/5861/1.html https://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/reporter/2001-02/weekly/5861/1.h... - although in fairness the inflexibility and disorganisation were existing features of the institution, and Oracle merely exacerbated them.
- tylerpachal 10y agoDo you think the same thing could happen with cloud vendors like AWS?
- rabidrat 10y agoYes, and pretty easily if you buy into all the new features that no one else will ever have all of. If you stay clean with simple storage, compute, DB, email, then you should be okay. Ideally you'd have some kind of plan though from the start, for which other cloud provider you would use and how the services would map, in case using AWS becomes untenable.
- Anasufovic 10y agoCloud product life cycles should definitely be more interesting. Azure for example already has a "classic" model and the new ARM model. Either way, avoid tightly coupling code with some external vendors service.
- ayuvar 10y agoI don't know if I've ever seen a successful database transition for a large project at a large firm. You basically have to build that from the start. Doing it after the fact in a politics-heavy organization is confounded by not just the technical difficulty of the task, but the glad-handing and perception management that has to happen to keep your team from getting fired during the process.