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>and you have staff who know that platform well. People often ignore how important this is, especially for a small team like Stack Overflow appears to have. A
by slg 6y ago
>and you have staff who know that platform well.
People often ignore how important this is, especially for a small team like Stack Overflow appears to have. A new platform requires training and/or a lack of productivity as employees learn the new system. It requires developer time to convert over any work designed to use the old system. It makes hiring more difficult because now you will either want someone with the knowledge of both your systems which greatly shrinks down your pool of potential hires or new employees will need to learn a new system on the job which increases the ramp time up for any hires. Maybe this doesn't fit the textbook definition of technical debt, but it is still a real and ongoing cost that comes with making a decision to switch tools.
- gbrayut 6y agoCase in point, one of my favorite system architecture/design blog posts: Providence: Failure Is Always An Option https://jasonpunyon.com/blog/2015/02/12/providence-failure-is-always-an-option/ https://jasonpunyon.com/blog/2015/02/12/providence-failure-i... Which has one of my favorite quotes about scope creep: Kevin and I have essentially become allergic to big projects. We attempt to practice “What can get done by Friday?” driven development. Keeping things small precludes a whole class of errors like “We need a new datastore”, ‘cause that ain’t gettin’ done by Friday. It’s hard to sink a week on something you weren’t supposed to be working on when all you have is a week.