4 ms·

I heartily agree with all the concerns here, but there are also business and professional development factors to consider, in addition to your present situation

by kd5bjo 7y ago

I heartily agree with all the concerns here, but there are also business and professional development factors to consider, in addition to your present situation: - How stable are your needs? Will your ideal setup be the same 6 months from now? - Is this a core piece of the business or a peripheral concern? - Which is more valuable: developers that understand the underlying theory, or developers that are familiar with the preexisting library? - Will the act of rolling your own library make your team more valuable? Will it make them too expensive? - How will this choice affect developer retention? Your ability to hire new developers?

franciscop 7y ago
Oh yeah, I just realized I missed a whole category: personal development. I would definitely not be here (probably not in software at all) if I hadn't reinvented the wheel again and again for fun and learning.
ptx 7y ago
> Will the act of rolling your own library make your team more valuable? Will it make them too expensive? Are you saying that developers should be kept ignorant and incompetent so that they'll have no choice but to stay at your company writing poor-quality software?
- kd5bjo 7y ago
  I’m saying that pushing your developers to improve will increase their market value, possibly outside your personnel budget. One possible outcome here is that they decide to leave and join a company that will give them a higher salary to reflect their increased skills. On the other hand, withholding opportunities for growth is also a way to frustrate employees and cause them to leave. Know your people, and take their changing needs into consideration when planning business strategy. There’s lots of strategies that can work here, but not all of them are right for every company. A few off the top of my head: - Build a training pipeline so you can regularly hire promising young developers for cheap and help them grow into a more senior position elsewhere. - As your developers improve, be prepared to give raises and promotions to reflect their increasing value. - Hire experienced developers with the skills you need at a fair price and offer stable employment instead of fast-track growth.
candiodari 7y ago
A problem I wonder about is that frameworks and doing things well are often diametric opposites. For example, studies keep pointing out that for e-commerce, low latency and ridiculously fast sites matter a lot. They get you from zero to functional really fast, and then you're stuck. You're not getting that with django, or ror, or ... And no, caching will not get you there, especially not if you take every framework's approach to caching: always set cache headers to never ever cache because it might be dynamic. The thing is, if you expect to really grow, you're going to have to roll your own, as that's the only way you'll ever get it really fast, really doing what you want.
- kd5bjo 7y ago
  Take two nominally identical physical products (from IKEA, for example), one that’s on the shelves today and the other produced several years ago. There’ll be lots of subtle changes that got made as the manufacturer figured out how to improve the product, by cutting costs or improving reliability. The frameworks you mention are great prototyping tools but as a community, we’re missing the knowledge of how to take a proven prototype and continue improving the quality rather than bolting on questionable new features.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > as a community, we’re missing the knowledge of how to take a proven prototype and continue improving the quality rather than bolting on questionable new features. No, we aren't. We know how to do that, and can do it when we want to. In software dev we rarely want to, because (loaded use of the qualifier “questionable” aside) product teams tend to perceive (not entirely inaccurately, though sometimes the particulars are in error) market demand for additional features. (Also, what physical products are very often optimizing is unit production cost for equivalent products, not quality. But software already has an essentially zero unit cost, so there's essentially no gains to be had optimizing that.)

by kd5bjo 7y ago

franciscop 7y ago

Oh yeah, I just realized I missed a whole category: personal development. I would definitely not be here (probably not in software at all) if I hadn't reinvented the wheel again and again for fun and learning.

ptx 7y ago

> Will the act of rolling your own library make your team more valuable? Will it make them too expensive? Are you saying that developers should be kept ignorant and incompetent so that they'll have no choice but to stay at your company writing poor-quality software?

kd5bjo 7y ago
I’m saying that pushing your developers to improve will increase their market value, possibly outside your personnel budget. One possible outcome here is that they decide to leave and join a company that will give them a higher salary to reflect their increased skills. On the other hand, withholding opportunities for growth is also a way to frustrate employees and cause them to leave. Know your people, and take their changing needs into consideration when planning business strategy. There’s lots of strategies that can work here, but not all of them are right for every company. A few off the top of my head: - Build a training pipeline so you can regularly hire promising young developers for cheap and help them grow into a more senior position elsewhere. - As your developers improve, be prepared to give raises and promotions to reflect their increasing value. - Hire experienced developers with the skills you need at a fair price and offer stable employment instead of fast-track growth.

candiodari 7y ago

A problem I wonder about is that frameworks and doing things well are often diametric opposites. For example, studies keep pointing out that for e-commerce, low latency and ridiculously fast sites matter a lot. They get you from zero to functional really fast, and then you're stuck. You're not getting that with django, or ror, or ... And no, caching will not get you there, especially not if you take every framework's approach to caching: always set cache headers to never ever cache because it might be dynamic. The thing is, if you expect to really grow, you're going to have to roll your own, as that's the only way you'll ever get it really fast, really doing what you want.

kd5bjo 7y ago
Take two nominally identical physical products (from IKEA, for example), one that’s on the shelves today and the other produced several years ago. There’ll be lots of subtle changes that got made as the manufacturer figured out how to improve the product, by cutting costs or improving reliability. The frameworks you mention are great prototyping tools but as a community, we’re missing the knowledge of how to take a proven prototype and continue improving the quality rather than bolting on questionable new features.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > as a community, we’re missing the knowledge of how to take a proven prototype and continue improving the quality rather than bolting on questionable new features. No, we aren't. We know how to do that, and can do it when we want to. In software dev we rarely want to, because (loaded use of the qualifier “questionable” aside) product teams tend to perceive (not entirely inaccurately, though sometimes the particulars are in error) market demand for additional features. (Also, what physical products are very often optimizing is unit production cost for equivalent products, not quality. But software already has an essentially zero unit cost, so there's essentially no gains to be had optimizing that.)