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I had a really bad experience in an organisation possessed by a platform team. A small number of individuals were rolling change after change that impacted hund

I had a really bad experience in an organisation possessed by a platform team. A small number of individuals were rolling change after change that impacted hundreds of engineers, halving their productivity and halting all development to a grind once a month.

botto 6y ago
I'm sorry to hear that as someone who has done this role in the past I can tell you that it's the opposite of what a platform team should be doing. When done right a platform team should basically not be noticed except that the tooling, developer experience and overall reliability of a system goes up.
- sam_lowry_ 6y ago
  «When done right a platform team should basically not be noticed except that the tooling, developer experience and overall reliability of a system goes up.» In memories!
geofft 6y ago
Did the platform team use their own platform? I have a theory that that's the right way to set up incentives, but I'm curious whether it works in practice.
fizx 6y ago
You know how we have that "libraries are better than frameworks" discussion once a month? It sounds like your platform team was a framework. Ideally, a platform team should give you reliable, self-service components to build upon, like databases, caches, rate-limiters, api-gateways, etc. If they're framework-ish, they're mandating you build your app in exactly their preferred way in order to receive the benefits.
- fuckyah 6y ago
  I’m in a large Corp that does the latter. It’s an absolute disgrace every single day. I’m sick and tired of it, but stuck with golden handcuffs... Can you recommend a public company that follows the former approach?
- k__ 6y ago
  ideally 99% of all companies shouldn't even have a platform team, but buy a platform from professionals.
  - user5994461 6y ago
    99% of companies should have a platform team, whose role is to make services from AWS/Google/Azure available internally and easy to use.
    - k__ 6y ago
      Yes, or that.
SanderKnape 6y ago
This is a typical challenge for platform teams. Because they are responsible for the underlying foundation on which applications are build, a mistake can easily impact all those applications. An important realization in my opinion is that a platform team is just another development team. They should consider their platform as a product and the developers as their customers. To minimize any downtime they should use the typical mechanisms that developers are also using: automated tests, pair programming, rolling out changes to test environments first, etc.

botto 6y ago

I'm sorry to hear that as someone who has done this role in the past I can tell you that it's the opposite of what a platform team should be doing. When done right a platform team should basically not be noticed except that the tooling, developer experience and overall reliability of a system goes up.

sam_lowry_ 6y ago
«When done right a platform team should basically not be noticed except that the tooling, developer experience and overall reliability of a system goes up.» In memories!

geofft 6y ago

Did the platform team use their own platform? I have a theory that that's the right way to set up incentives, but I'm curious whether it works in practice.

fizx 6y ago

You know how we have that "libraries are better than frameworks" discussion once a month? It sounds like your platform team was a framework. Ideally, a platform team should give you reliable, self-service components to build upon, like databases, caches, rate-limiters, api-gateways, etc. If they're framework-ish, they're mandating you build your app in exactly their preferred way in order to receive the benefits.

fuckyah 6y ago
I’m in a large Corp that does the latter. It’s an absolute disgrace every single day. I’m sick and tired of it, but stuck with golden handcuffs... Can you recommend a public company that follows the former approach?
k__ 6y ago
ideally 99% of all companies shouldn't even have a platform team, but buy a platform from professionals.
- user5994461 6y ago
  99% of companies should have a platform team, whose role is to make services from AWS/Google/Azure available internally and easy to use.
  - k__ 6y ago
    Yes, or that.

SanderKnape 6y ago

This is a typical challenge for platform teams. Because they are responsible for the underlying foundation on which applications are build, a mistake can easily impact all those applications. An important realization in my opinion is that a platform team is just another development team. They should consider their platform as a product and the developers as their customers. To minimize any downtime they should use the typical mechanisms that developers are also using: automated tests, pair programming, rolling out changes to test environments first, etc.