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> As an engineer-turned-manager, I spend a lot of time asking engineers how we can simplify their ambitious plans. Often it’s as simple as asking “What would we

> As an engineer-turned-manager, I spend a lot of time asking engineers how we can simplify their ambitious plans. Often it’s as simple as asking “What would we give up by using a monolith here instead of microservices?” Funny you mentioned this. I have the exact opposite problem. That is, I am an engineer trying to push back against management mandating the use of microservices and microfrontends because they are the new “hot” tech noawadays.

Twisol 6y ago
On my reading, this is the exact same problem, not the exact opposite problem. The break-even bar for a reasonable monolith is a lot lower than for microservices, so the GP's question is specifically asking, under a hypothetical where the team simply uses a monolith, what benefits the team would miss out on relative to microservices. If there are none, or they aren't relevant to the project scenario, then microservices probably isn't justifiable. (I, too, am in the position of pushing back against microservices for hotness' sake.)
- pseudalopex 6y ago
  The point is it can be engineers pushing back against managers. Not just managers pushing back against engineers.
  - Twisol 6y ago
    Aha! Opposite in that direction; I misread. (I'm also an engineer pushing back on managers who want microservices.)
Jcampuzano2 6y ago
This. I'm a consultant and 90% of the time the technology has already been decided by our fancy management team who haven't written code in 10+ years before a line of code has been written. But they know the buzzwords like the rest of us and know they sell. Problem is they no longer have to implement, so they are even more inclined to sell the most complicated tech stack that have marketing pages claiming they scale to basically infinity.
- alexb7c4 6y ago
  In my company we store financial data for hundreds of thousands of clients in sql db. It's decade okd system and we have hundreds of tables, stored procedures (some touching dozen+ tables) and rely on transactions. It took me weeks to convince my managers not to migrate to new hot nosql solution because "it's in cloud, it's scalable and it also supports sql queries".

Twisol 6y ago

On my reading, this is the exact same problem, not the exact opposite problem. The break-even bar for a reasonable monolith is a lot lower than for microservices, so the GP's question is specifically asking, under a hypothetical where the team simply uses a monolith, what benefits the team would miss out on relative to microservices. If there are none, or they aren't relevant to the project scenario, then microservices probably isn't justifiable. (I, too, am in the position of pushing back against microservices for hotness' sake.)

pseudalopex 6y ago
The point is it can be engineers pushing back against managers. Not just managers pushing back against engineers.
- Twisol 6y ago
  Aha! Opposite in that direction; I misread. (I'm also an engineer pushing back on managers who want microservices.)

Jcampuzano2 6y ago

This. I'm a consultant and 90% of the time the technology has already been decided by our fancy management team who haven't written code in 10+ years before a line of code has been written. But they know the buzzwords like the rest of us and know they sell. Problem is they no longer have to implement, so they are even more inclined to sell the most complicated tech stack that have marketing pages claiming they scale to basically infinity.

alexb7c4 6y ago
In my company we store financial data for hundreds of thousands of clients in sql db. It's decade okd system and we have hundreds of tables, stored procedures (some touching dozen+ tables) and rely on transactions. It took me weeks to convince my managers not to migrate to new hot nosql solution because "it's in cloud, it's scalable and it also supports sql queries".