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Supporting more choices is hugely important even for very small companies. One of the biggest alarm bells that it’s time to leave a company is when they start d

by mlthoughts2018 6y ago

Supporting more choices is hugely important even for very small companies. One of the biggest alarm bells that it’s time to leave a company is when they start deeply enforcing just one database solution, just one message queue solution, just one language, just one big data processing engine, etc. You need extreme diversity of these tools to benefit from inventiveness of your staff. Company mandates to strictly limit to one way will just beat creativity out of people and burn them out. This is especially stupid if the reason for enforcing just one way or just one tool is to make SRE lives easier. Aside from that being the tail wagging the dog and making no business sense, you have the power to use software abstractions to still make SRE lives easier even without limiting freedom to use any system, even in a small company.

jeffffff 6y ago
while mandates to only use one tool can be overly restrictive, allowing a free for all is equally if not more dangerous. there are a lot of benefits to using a standard set of tools, and developers are for the most part really bad at calculating the ROI of introducing a new tool where an existing option may already be good enough. https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology
jacques_chester 6y ago
Choice isn't free. It imposes costs on other teams and the company as a whole. Other teams need to deal with more idioms and performance patterns, need more libraries, need to operate a more heterogeneous network etc. The company itself faces higher costs for integrating data, higher difficulty in rotating engineers between teams, has more difficulty hiring, can't get cost efficiencies by investing in optimisation of fewer platforms and so on. Engineering isn't art. It's engineering, a field where creativity and innovation works within economic, technical and moral constraints.

jeffffff 6y ago

while mandates to only use one tool can be overly restrictive, allowing a free for all is equally if not more dangerous. there are a lot of benefits to using a standard set of tools, and developers are for the most part really bad at calculating the ROI of introducing a new tool where an existing option may already be good enough. https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology

jacques_chester 6y ago

Choice isn't free. It imposes costs on other teams and the company as a whole. Other teams need to deal with more idioms and performance patterns, need more libraries, need to operate a more heterogeneous network etc. The company itself faces higher costs for integrating data, higher difficulty in rotating engineers between teams, has more difficulty hiring, can't get cost efficiencies by investing in optimisation of fewer platforms and so on. Engineering isn't art. It's engineering, a field where creativity and innovation works within economic, technical and moral constraints.