6 ms·

> I guess stable just wasn't good enough I suspect that's meant to be rhetorical, but from a business perspective, was stable good enough? Sometimes what work

> I guess stable just wasn't good enough I suspect that's meant to be rhetorical, but from a business perspective, was stable good enough? Sometimes what works now won't be competitive in the near future.

tluyben2 6y ago
> Sometimes what works now won't be competitive in the near future. What do you mean by that? I can understand in terms of hiring devs, this is true, but any other reason I would be curious about. Because I work with/in many companies, I see a lot of different tech and competitive is usually just what the team knows best. So unless you are making a new team, I cannot phantom why you would switch. Java with Servlets/Spring and C# with asp.net have been competitive for almost 2 decades; maybe some people can shave off a few minutes here and there but in the grand scheme of a serious company with a serious project (500k loc+) it is not going to matter. There are exceptions as for instance machine learning but those gaps close and this was about web frameworks.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  Perhaps he means that you won’t be able to attract great talent. A lot of extremely talented engineers don’t want to work on code bases and technologies that are 15 years old.
  - binsh 6y ago
    Definitely would like a source for this because I feel like I hear it a lot and I don't believe it's true. You can be talented and not care what you work on. And if all you care about is what tech is new and shiny, how talented can you be? I don't want you rewriting my product every year so you can use the next framework du jour. Maybe talent means something else when nothing is at stake, but I'd argue that a talented engineer knows that when a product works and makes money, and the tech stack isn't prohibitive of those goals, it doesn't really matter what it's written in. In fact, I see trend-chasing developers as liabilities, because they're the ones who will replace everything every six months while you bleed money.
    - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
      > they're the ones who will replace everything every six months while you bleed money. Yep. I agree. Maybe talent is the wrong word, but my point is that a lot of experienced engineers want to learn new things by working on new things. There is a difference between talent and wisdom. My source? Decades of experience in the industry working with hundreds of different engineers. So, anecdotal. Not everything needs a double-blind research study to be truthful.
    - ratww 6y ago
      The issue is rarely the age of the codebase or the tech stack, but rather the maintainability and quality of the code. Due to many factors, the age of the codebase is normally inversely proportional to its code quality. Especially codebases in fields where trends change fast, like web technology. Therefore, if you're a talented engineer able to work in multiple technologies you'll certainly prefer to work on something that has less chances of making you want to tear your hair out.
      - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
        > the age of the codebase is normally inversely proportional to its code quality. What??? You are saying that simply because a code base is old, it is of poor quality. There are numerous public examples contradicting this: Linux, many Apache projects such as httpd, etc. I emphatically disagree and would like to know why you think that.
        ratww 6y ago
        I said "normally". I don't think anyone considers Linux or httpd "old tech", neither they are "legacy software" that experienced developers are running away from. C might be old as a language, but there are still modern things being built with it. I also said that the issue is not the age itself or the tech stack.
        TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
        You didn't use the word legacy in your post. You used the word old. Quite different. Something can be old and still maintained (httpd, etc).
  - somurzakov 6y ago
    both java and .net (core) are evolving and more mature, though
KaiserPro 6y ago
Take a new site for example Its just text and pictures on a web page. The new york times re-invented a database out of kafka to power theirs (mind bogglingly stupid) The Guardian re-wrote their CMS at least 4 times, at a cost of well over 50 million, if not more. Thats before they got to re-doing the layout. The FT spent 6(!) years rebuilding their entire stack, (150 tech staff for 6 years. a good percentage contractors. > £70million) All of it is just fucking text on a fucking web page. All that effort to add fancy gizmos for hosting, optimising for framework x, which has a half life of 6 months, adding animation to drop downs. Just a spectacular waste. They are still re-platforming every 9 months, each of the 5 major teams. All of that money could have been put into content, advertising for customers, collaborations & events. Most news sites can get away with a static, highly cached system (I mean look at the Daily mail, the page is slow, static and looks like shit, yet its the biggest new paper site online) So form a business perceptive, its spaffing money up the wall for no real gain.
- moreaccountspls 6y ago
  I wish I could upvote this a thousand times. At the end of the day, it's all ego driven development. Nobody wants to think that their job has already been solved, and what's left is mundane and boring [engineering wise]. And so the business ends up with using a distributed log to handle a data set that could fit on a big thumb drive.
- cagenut 6y ago
  can confirm. media companies spent the last decade alternating between redesigns and cms migrations in a circular path that went nowhere while fb & goog ate not just their lunch but their breakfast and dinner too. the vast majority of it was driven by engineering-management-career resume-building and was actively detrimental to the editorial/content-production/journalism side of the house.
  - throwlogon 6y ago
    > [T]he vast majority of it was driven by engineering-management-career resume-building and was actively detrimental to the editorial/content-production/journalism side of the house. Why didn't the non-technology side prevent this if it was so clearly detrimental? I can't imagine that the technology side of a media concern has that much influence over the company's overall priorities.

tluyben2 6y ago

> Sometimes what works now won't be competitive in the near future. What do you mean by that? I can understand in terms of hiring devs, this is true, but any other reason I would be curious about. Because I work with/in many companies, I see a lot of different tech and competitive is usually just what the team knows best. So unless you are making a new team, I cannot phantom why you would switch. Java with Servlets/Spring and C# with asp.net have been competitive for almost 2 decades; maybe some people can shave off a few minutes here and there but in the grand scheme of a serious company with a serious project (500k loc+) it is not going to matter. There are exceptions as for instance machine learning but those gaps close and this was about web frameworks.

TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
Perhaps he means that you won’t be able to attract great talent. A lot of extremely talented engineers don’t want to work on code bases and technologies that are 15 years old.
- binsh 6y ago
  Definitely would like a source for this because I feel like I hear it a lot and I don't believe it's true. You can be talented and not care what you work on. And if all you care about is what tech is new and shiny, how talented can you be? I don't want you rewriting my product every year so you can use the next framework du jour. Maybe talent means something else when nothing is at stake, but I'd argue that a talented engineer knows that when a product works and makes money, and the tech stack isn't prohibitive of those goals, it doesn't really matter what it's written in. In fact, I see trend-chasing developers as liabilities, because they're the ones who will replace everything every six months while you bleed money.
  - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
    > they're the ones who will replace everything every six months while you bleed money. Yep. I agree. Maybe talent is the wrong word, but my point is that a lot of experienced engineers want to learn new things by working on new things. There is a difference between talent and wisdom. My source? Decades of experience in the industry working with hundreds of different engineers. So, anecdotal. Not everything needs a double-blind research study to be truthful.
  - ratww 6y ago
    The issue is rarely the age of the codebase or the tech stack, but rather the maintainability and quality of the code. Due to many factors, the age of the codebase is normally inversely proportional to its code quality. Especially codebases in fields where trends change fast, like web technology. Therefore, if you're a talented engineer able to work in multiple technologies you'll certainly prefer to work on something that has less chances of making you want to tear your hair out.
    - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
      > the age of the codebase is normally inversely proportional to its code quality. What??? You are saying that simply because a code base is old, it is of poor quality. There are numerous public examples contradicting this: Linux, many Apache projects such as httpd, etc. I emphatically disagree and would like to know why you think that.
      - ratww 6y ago
        I said "normally". I don't think anyone considers Linux or httpd "old tech", neither they are "legacy software" that experienced developers are running away from. C might be old as a language, but there are still modern things being built with it. I also said that the issue is not the age itself or the tech stack.
        TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
        You didn't use the word legacy in your post. You used the word old. Quite different. Something can be old and still maintained (httpd, etc).
- somurzakov 6y ago
  both java and .net (core) are evolving and more mature, though

KaiserPro 6y ago

Take a new site for example Its just text and pictures on a web page. The new york times re-invented a database out of kafka to power theirs (mind bogglingly stupid) The Guardian re-wrote their CMS at least 4 times, at a cost of well over 50 million, if not more. Thats before they got to re-doing the layout. The FT spent 6(!) years rebuilding their entire stack, (150 tech staff for 6 years. a good percentage contractors. > £70million) All of it is just fucking text on a fucking web page. All that effort to add fancy gizmos for hosting, optimising for framework x, which has a half life of 6 months, adding animation to drop downs. Just a spectacular waste. They are still re-platforming every 9 months, each of the 5 major teams. All of that money could have been put into content, advertising for customers, collaborations & events. Most news sites can get away with a static, highly cached system (I mean look at the Daily mail, the page is slow, static and looks like shit, yet its the biggest new paper site online) So form a business perceptive, its spaffing money up the wall for no real gain.

moreaccountspls 6y ago
I wish I could upvote this a thousand times. At the end of the day, it's all ego driven development. Nobody wants to think that their job has already been solved, and what's left is mundane and boring [engineering wise]. And so the business ends up with using a distributed log to handle a data set that could fit on a big thumb drive.
cagenut 6y ago
can confirm. media companies spent the last decade alternating between redesigns and cms migrations in a circular path that went nowhere while fb & goog ate not just their lunch but their breakfast and dinner too. the vast majority of it was driven by engineering-management-career resume-building and was actively detrimental to the editorial/content-production/journalism side of the house.
- throwlogon 6y ago
  > [T]he vast majority of it was driven by engineering-management-career resume-building and was actively detrimental to the editorial/content-production/journalism side of the house. Why didn't the non-technology side prevent this if it was so clearly detrimental? I can't imagine that the technology side of a media concern has that much influence over the company's overall priorities.