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Why is this getting so much attention? When I first saw the dozen or so headlines exclaiming 1/3 of the company quit I assumed it was a huge company. The place

Why is this getting so much attention? When I first saw the dozen or so headlines exclaiming 1/3 of the company quit I assumed it was a huge company. The place only has 60 employees!

pseudalopex 6y ago
The company is well known. The people in charge have written books about how to run companies. Hansson created Rails. Politics at work is a hot topic for HN now.
- seattle_spring 6y ago
  > Hansson created Rails It sounds like the old adage, "the architecture of the company mimics the architecture of the software," applies very well here. In this case, the company's stance on politics scales about as well as Rails.
  - jensvdh 6y ago
    Shopify and Airbnb were able to become multi-billion dollar companies mostly by running on Rails before it became unsustainable. I'd say Rails scaled pretty well.
    - Tainnor 6y ago
      While true, I also remember watching a presentation about Shopify where they explained how they spent a whole year migrating to a newer Rails version. Now, Shopify clearly has the capacity to pull this off. But a smaller company that initially bet on Rails and is now facing a mountain of tech debt might not. To be fair: it is possible to write Rails applications in a way that you don't couple every aspect of your application to Rails internals. But in certain crucial ways, Rails encourages doing exactly that - dragging the DB along your whole application, for example. I've been a Rails developer for a couple of years and I left that ecosystem in no small part because a huge chunk of that community seems to treat "architecture" as a dirty word and monkeypatching as a solution for everything (and also indulges into making fun of PHP or Java a bit too much for my taste). Of course, everyone's experiences are different and you can do great stuff with Rails, but for me it's something I don't really want to go back to.
      - seattle_spring 6y ago
        Airbnb has also been vocal about the multi year slog to dig themselves out of their Rails hole.
        arp242 6y ago
        On the other hand, it probably also enabled them to get up & running with a MVP fairly fast and low-cost. No one knew it was going to be the big success from the get-go, and most new companies fail. In hindsight, it was probably a bad choice. At the time however, it was probably a good one. Besides, things like AirBnB are the exceptions. Most sites don't get anywhere near the traffic they get, and Rails is often a good choice. Is it imperfect and are there trade-offs involved? Of course, but there are with anything.
        Tainnor 6y ago
        > Is it imperfect and are there trade-offs involved? Of course, but there are with anything. No disagreement here. But the argument was made that Rails "scales pretty well" and I believe this is wrong — and I don't even mean in terms of performance (that probably too), but also in terms of architectural complexity. All these problems are solvable of course, but Rails makes it IMHO harder than some other technologies.
        arp242 6y ago
        I haven't significantly worked with Rails since 2015, so I'm not up to speed with the current state of things, but in general I found that architecturally Rails can scale mostly okay, although it can be a bit tricky if you're not very familiar with the Rails internals, but it's not overly complex either in my experience. I was never a Rails super-expert either, and I managed to bolt on plenty of stuff for customers' specific needs, and the results worked fairly well and weren't too overly complex. I don't doubt there are certain roadblocks though, and that some things fairly "simple" could be very hard and complex in Rails. I just never encountered them. I've certainly seen a lot more overly complex crappy bespoke solutions when Rails + a few modifications would have been much better. This is like the old Greenspun's tenth rule: "any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." – there are a lot of "ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementations of half of Ruby on Rails" out there. Right now I mostly write web stuff with Go, which is the exact opposite of Ruby/Rails in almost every way. In spite of being so different, I'm fairly comfterable with both approaches, and I'm not entirely sure what I prefer yet (even though I've been doing this in Go for 6 years now); I certainly spent a lot more time on basic stuff that Rails just provides.
groby_b 6y ago
Because the founders have positioned themselves as the thought leaders how to manage a company really well. 5 books and counting. Meanwhile, this whole thing was a masterclass on how not to manage a team. There are few stories that grab attention like hubris & comeuppance.

Why is this getting so much attention? When I first saw the dozen or so headlines exclaiming 1/3 of the company quit I assumed it was a huge company. The place only has 60 employees!

pseudalopex 6y ago

The company is well known. The people in charge have written books about how to run companies. Hansson created Rails. Politics at work is a hot topic for HN now.

seattle_spring 6y ago
> Hansson created Rails It sounds like the old adage, "the architecture of the company mimics the architecture of the software," applies very well here. In this case, the company's stance on politics scales about as well as Rails.
- jensvdh 6y ago
  Shopify and Airbnb were able to become multi-billion dollar companies mostly by running on Rails before it became unsustainable. I'd say Rails scaled pretty well.
  - Tainnor 6y ago
    While true, I also remember watching a presentation about Shopify where they explained how they spent a whole year migrating to a newer Rails version. Now, Shopify clearly has the capacity to pull this off. But a smaller company that initially bet on Rails and is now facing a mountain of tech debt might not. To be fair: it is possible to write Rails applications in a way that you don't couple every aspect of your application to Rails internals. But in certain crucial ways, Rails encourages doing exactly that - dragging the DB along your whole application, for example. I've been a Rails developer for a couple of years and I left that ecosystem in no small part because a huge chunk of that community seems to treat "architecture" as a dirty word and monkeypatching as a solution for everything (and also indulges into making fun of PHP or Java a bit too much for my taste). Of course, everyone's experiences are different and you can do great stuff with Rails, but for me it's something I don't really want to go back to.
    - seattle_spring 6y ago
      Airbnb has also been vocal about the multi year slog to dig themselves out of their Rails hole.
      - arp242 6y ago
        On the other hand, it probably also enabled them to get up & running with a MVP fairly fast and low-cost. No one knew it was going to be the big success from the get-go, and most new companies fail. In hindsight, it was probably a bad choice. At the time however, it was probably a good one. Besides, things like AirBnB are the exceptions. Most sites don't get anywhere near the traffic they get, and Rails is often a good choice. Is it imperfect and are there trade-offs involved? Of course, but there are with anything.
        Tainnor 6y ago
        > Is it imperfect and are there trade-offs involved? Of course, but there are with anything. No disagreement here. But the argument was made that Rails "scales pretty well" and I believe this is wrong — and I don't even mean in terms of performance (that probably too), but also in terms of architectural complexity. All these problems are solvable of course, but Rails makes it IMHO harder than some other technologies.
        arp242 6y ago
        I haven't significantly worked with Rails since 2015, so I'm not up to speed with the current state of things, but in general I found that architecturally Rails can scale mostly okay, although it can be a bit tricky if you're not very familiar with the Rails internals, but it's not overly complex either in my experience. I was never a Rails super-expert either, and I managed to bolt on plenty of stuff for customers' specific needs, and the results worked fairly well and weren't too overly complex. I don't doubt there are certain roadblocks though, and that some things fairly "simple" could be very hard and complex in Rails. I just never encountered them. I've certainly seen a lot more overly complex crappy bespoke solutions when Rails + a few modifications would have been much better. This is like the old Greenspun's tenth rule: "any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp." – there are a lot of "ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementations of half of Ruby on Rails" out there. Right now I mostly write web stuff with Go, which is the exact opposite of Ruby/Rails in almost every way. In spite of being so different, I'm fairly comfterable with both approaches, and I'm not entirely sure what I prefer yet (even though I've been doing this in Go for 6 years now); I certainly spent a lot more time on basic stuff that Rails just provides.

groby_b 6y ago

Because the founders have positioned themselves as the thought leaders how to manage a company really well. 5 books and counting. Meanwhile, this whole thing was a masterclass on how not to manage a team. There are few stories that grab attention like hubris & comeuppance.