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>At the mid-size corporation that I work at, we just standardized all Javascript development on Angular from a mismash of a ton of technologies. Angular seems v

>At the mid-size corporation that I work at, we just standardized all Javascript development on Angular from a mismash of a ton of technologies. Angular seems very well suited for this role. In my experience centralisation and fixation on specific technology leads to stagnation quickly. IMO you should allow teams to choose their own tools. How else will you improve?

lopatin 8y ago
To quote one of Akin's laws which were on HN yesterday, "better is the enemy of good". It's really good when one technology is used throughout an organization to achieve the same purpose. At some point, the technology you use is actually good enough, and incremental improvements to "keep up with the times" are simply distractions from the real work. And if at some point you find that your tech has truly stagnated, at least you're stagnated together, and can modernize together at the same time.
- zygimantasdev 8y ago
  The problem is how will you find that your tech has stagnated? If nobody experiments with new tech - who will teach others? How will that knowledge come into your corp? Hiring new people to do that will not work, because: - People being hired will be evaluated by legacy people (different thinking will be considered disadvantage during interviews) - Legacy people will not listen to new hires since they have no credibility and it "has been the way it was always done"
  - lopatin 8y ago
    These are solvable problems. Just because a group of engineers agree on a standard tool, doesn't mean that they are blind to the world around them, or that they are now doomed to be single minded "legacy" people. I'm sorry if in your experience this hasn't been the case. Maintaining a balance between using modern technology and having a healthy "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude is certainly do-able. But when every team is doing it's own version of the same thing, that's another story. It can be crushing to productivity, in fact it's likely to be the deciding factor if some types work get done at all. And, unlike your concerns about preventing stagnation, the only way to solve that problem is to stop doing it.
organicmultiloc 8y ago
This sounds like how you'd end up doing web development in the least efficient way possible. There is a ton of space for reuse, the web is dead simple and the same pattern shows up over and over and over.
- zygimantasdev 8y ago
  You can reuse almost as much without forcing one framework for all teams - making it not least efficient way possible. Not using one tool will encourage team to explore new possibilities, alternatives, learn new paradigms and thinking. In long term this is certainly more effective. Web is not dead simple (I consider web to be frontend development in this context). Why I would consider web to be hard: - it is harder to do frontend development than backend, because you write code which is sent to one of thousand different compilers, creating another layer of difficulty. Versus controlled environment where your backend code is being run - While there are only few patterns which are applied to FE development, there are many new features(PWAs, real time syncs,..) coming into web. Taking advantage of them requires learning, coding and refactoring. You might say - this is just reinventing the wheel - while partly that is true, developers will still need to learn, adapt knowledge to web, build tools.

lopatin 8y ago

To quote one of Akin's laws which were on HN yesterday, "better is the enemy of good". It's really good when one technology is used throughout an organization to achieve the same purpose. At some point, the technology you use is actually good enough, and incremental improvements to "keep up with the times" are simply distractions from the real work. And if at some point you find that your tech has truly stagnated, at least you're stagnated together, and can modernize together at the same time.

zygimantasdev 8y ago
The problem is how will you find that your tech has stagnated? If nobody experiments with new tech - who will teach others? How will that knowledge come into your corp? Hiring new people to do that will not work, because: - People being hired will be evaluated by legacy people (different thinking will be considered disadvantage during interviews) - Legacy people will not listen to new hires since they have no credibility and it "has been the way it was always done"
- lopatin 8y ago
  These are solvable problems. Just because a group of engineers agree on a standard tool, doesn't mean that they are blind to the world around them, or that they are now doomed to be single minded "legacy" people. I'm sorry if in your experience this hasn't been the case. Maintaining a balance between using modern technology and having a healthy "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" attitude is certainly do-able. But when every team is doing it's own version of the same thing, that's another story. It can be crushing to productivity, in fact it's likely to be the deciding factor if some types work get done at all. And, unlike your concerns about preventing stagnation, the only way to solve that problem is to stop doing it.

organicmultiloc 8y ago

This sounds like how you'd end up doing web development in the least efficient way possible. There is a ton of space for reuse, the web is dead simple and the same pattern shows up over and over and over.

zygimantasdev 8y ago
You can reuse almost as much without forcing one framework for all teams - making it not least efficient way possible. Not using one tool will encourage team to explore new possibilities, alternatives, learn new paradigms and thinking. In long term this is certainly more effective. Web is not dead simple (I consider web to be frontend development in this context). Why I would consider web to be hard: - it is harder to do frontend development than backend, because you write code which is sent to one of thousand different compilers, creating another layer of difficulty. Versus controlled environment where your backend code is being run - While there are only few patterns which are applied to FE development, there are many new features(PWAs, real time syncs,..) coming into web. Taking advantage of them requires learning, coding and refactoring. You might say - this is just reinventing the wheel - while partly that is true, developers will still need to learn, adapt knowledge to web, build tools.