4 ms·

I just encountered this 2 days ago. When the company decides to adopt a new (to them) technology stack that is not part of where I see my future self.

maze-le 9y ago
New tech stacks can be learned. If it fits the development and product, why not? Even if you have a personal dislike for it, you could still learn from it. I find in-fighting, interpersonal quibbles and ridiculing of co-workers far more insufferable.
- pier25 9y ago
  What about moving to old stacks like... PHP?
  - zelos 9y ago
    Then start calling recruiters like your life depends on it.
  - thehardsphere 9y ago
    PHP's problem isn't its age, but that it was intended to do a very specific task in a very specific context, and people who came to it later lack a fundamental understanding of this. If, somehow through magic, PHP was invented today, it would still have this problem, which is the root of most of the other problems with PHP. I only mention this because some "old stacks" are good, in the sense that they are heavily battle tested, and people still use them because they've been successful over a number of years. You have to be able to use your judgement as a professional to determine whether the move to the "old stack" stems from a good reason or not before deciding to jump. (I personally would jump if I someone said "let's use PHP instead," but I don't think I would be in a job where PHP could be considered an alternative in the first place. Your situation could be different.)
- copperx 9y ago
  I've found that learning new tech is orders of magnitude simpler than whiners on the internet make it seem. I put off learning Rails years ago because post after post talked about how hard it was to get it right, how the person behind CDBaby totally failed to make Rails work for him, etc., etc. Then I sat down to learn it, imagining it would be a long month, but I learned the basics in 2 days. The exact same thing happened with React. I put it off for so long, thinking it was so hard after reading so many posts. It turns out that it's pretty straightforward. There's still an element of fear before approaching anything new. A voice in my head says "maybe I'm not smart enough anymore to understand this new tech, which looks like it was engineered by aliens." I need to remind myself that I have been able to understand and master everything I have attempted. But the posts out there make it seem learning something new is very hard.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
thehardsphere 9y ago
May I ask what the stack is?
- quitteraway 9y ago
  We've just spent half a year moving a legacy* Java app to nodeJS and now some of them want to redo everything in Rails. *: all the original engineers have left.
  - thehardsphere 9y ago
    That sounds bad. Generally, someone at the company should be saying no to these rewrites unless they have a very clear business motivation. Total rewrites easily spiral into being costly disasters, and usually don't solve a customer's problems. If nobody is at least trying to say no to these things, that means your company may have other problems with defining business objectives and fulfilling them. Even if nobody understood the Java app, that itself is not a good enough reason to rewrite it in another stack. Actually, not understanding the current implementation is probably the worst reason to do a rewrite, because the team likely doesn't understand the problem well enough to successfully reimplement the solution. The fact that they did this in nodeJS and now someone is talking about doing it in Rails makes it sound like there weren't strong reasons for choosing nodeJS established up front. It sounds like people are deciding these things based on hype and not actual technical merit, because the "sweet spots" of the three stacks you've mentioned are all quite different. There are good reasons to choose Java, nodeJS, or Rails for any given project, but there are generally not good reasons to bounce between them for the same project. The only case I can think of where that would make sense would be to move from Rails to Java due to scaling issues (e.g. if you are Twitter). I don't think there is much compelling reason to go the other way, unless your legacy Java app is super-dooper legacy like the FactoryFactoryFactoryFactoryFactory stuff people used to write in the early 2000s. Which itself might indicate an entirely different set of problems. I'd bail out if I were you and try to work at a company with better engineers working for it. Even if this job is stable you will become a better engineer by being around better engineers who aren't going to be proposing giant rewrites.
zelos 9y ago
I might be worth giving it a chance. Being paid to learn new technology is a pretty good deal. If you still find you don't like it, then move.
- quitteraway 9y ago
  Problem is that Rails isn't new to me.

maze-le 9y ago

New tech stacks can be learned. If it fits the development and product, why not? Even if you have a personal dislike for it, you could still learn from it. I find in-fighting, interpersonal quibbles and ridiculing of co-workers far more insufferable.

pier25 9y ago
What about moving to old stacks like... PHP?
- zelos 9y ago
  Then start calling recruiters like your life depends on it.
- thehardsphere 9y ago
  PHP's problem isn't its age, but that it was intended to do a very specific task in a very specific context, and people who came to it later lack a fundamental understanding of this. If, somehow through magic, PHP was invented today, it would still have this problem, which is the root of most of the other problems with PHP. I only mention this because some "old stacks" are good, in the sense that they are heavily battle tested, and people still use them because they've been successful over a number of years. You have to be able to use your judgement as a professional to determine whether the move to the "old stack" stems from a good reason or not before deciding to jump. (I personally would jump if I someone said "let's use PHP instead," but I don't think I would be in a job where PHP could be considered an alternative in the first place. Your situation could be different.)
copperx 9y ago
I've found that learning new tech is orders of magnitude simpler than whiners on the internet make it seem. I put off learning Rails years ago because post after post talked about how hard it was to get it right, how the person behind CDBaby totally failed to make Rails work for him, etc., etc. Then I sat down to learn it, imagining it would be a long month, but I learned the basics in 2 days. The exact same thing happened with React. I put it off for so long, thinking it was so hard after reading so many posts. It turns out that it's pretty straightforward. There's still an element of fear before approaching anything new. A voice in my head says "maybe I'm not smart enough anymore to understand this new tech, which looks like it was engineered by aliens." I need to remind myself that I have been able to understand and master everything I have attempted. But the posts out there make it seem learning something new is very hard.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

thehardsphere 9y ago

May I ask what the stack is?

quitteraway 9y ago
We've just spent half a year moving a legacy* Java app to nodeJS and now some of them want to redo everything in Rails. *: all the original engineers have left.
- thehardsphere 9y ago
  That sounds bad. Generally, someone at the company should be saying no to these rewrites unless they have a very clear business motivation. Total rewrites easily spiral into being costly disasters, and usually don't solve a customer's problems. If nobody is at least trying to say no to these things, that means your company may have other problems with defining business objectives and fulfilling them. Even if nobody understood the Java app, that itself is not a good enough reason to rewrite it in another stack. Actually, not understanding the current implementation is probably the worst reason to do a rewrite, because the team likely doesn't understand the problem well enough to successfully reimplement the solution. The fact that they did this in nodeJS and now someone is talking about doing it in Rails makes it sound like there weren't strong reasons for choosing nodeJS established up front. It sounds like people are deciding these things based on hype and not actual technical merit, because the "sweet spots" of the three stacks you've mentioned are all quite different. There are good reasons to choose Java, nodeJS, or Rails for any given project, but there are generally not good reasons to bounce between them for the same project. The only case I can think of where that would make sense would be to move from Rails to Java due to scaling issues (e.g. if you are Twitter). I don't think there is much compelling reason to go the other way, unless your legacy Java app is super-dooper legacy like the FactoryFactoryFactoryFactoryFactory stuff people used to write in the early 2000s. Which itself might indicate an entirely different set of problems. I'd bail out if I were you and try to work at a company with better engineers working for it. Even if this job is stable you will become a better engineer by being around better engineers who aren't going to be proposing giant rewrites.

zelos 9y ago

I might be worth giving it a chance. Being paid to learn new technology is a pretty good deal. If you still find you don't like it, then move.

quitteraway 9y ago
Problem is that Rails isn't new to me.