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We at $Famous_company Switched to $Hyped_technology
- akoncius 5y agosounds about right! I got some of those vibes more than twice in my experience :D
- tayo42 5y agoWonder what the tipping point was to get the author to write this.
- systemvoltage 5y agoIt echoes the famous Instagram architecture talk. Almost exactly. https://youtu.be/hnpzNAPiC0E https://youtu.be/hnpzNAPiC0E
- serial_dev 5y agoAnother famous instance of $cool_startup hyping up and ditching a technology was Airbnb and React Native.
- saagarjha 5y agoNo particular tipping point, really, just a lot of reading the same thing over and over again. I think I mostly wrote it the morning prior to posting it? But in a sense it was “written” over a several years before I finally put it down on paper…err, a Markdown document.
- malshe 5y agoI think the author is on HN if I am not mistaken (saagarjha)
- saagarjha 5y agowaves
- axiosgunnar 5y agoWhat is the slur „techbro“ supposed to refer to? That one of the founders is whiter than average and his parents were not poor, thus all his success obviously comes from one of his many priviledges, nevermind any hard work, determination etc? (Note: am not white myself, I just prefer to judge people on their merit)
- alephxyz 5y agoWhere in the blog post did you see anything about "techbro" referring to a white person? Or anything about race in general?
- pessimizer 5y agoSometimes people eager to complain accidentally tell on themselves.
- Bancakes 5y agoGPT-3 posting hours
- stirfish 5y agoTechbro is a mindset, not a socio-economic class. It's like the nerd version of an instagram influencer. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Techbro https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Techbro
- axiosgunnar 5y agoI see, that makes sense, thanks!
- actually_a_dog 5y agoThen, why are the vast majority of the images of people in Google image search results for "techbro" or "tech bro" white men? Serious question. https://www.google.com/search?q=techbro&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjqjb2ik_71AhVhI0QIHW00A6cQ_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=1152&bih=580&dpr=2.5 https://www.google.com/search?q=techbro&source=lnms&tbm=isch... https://www.google.com/search?q=tech+bro&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwih5qHalP71AhUjJEQIHWFHDlcQ_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=1152&bih=580&dpr=2.5 https://www.google.com/search?q=tech+bro&source=lnms&tbm=isc...
- jlundberg 5y agoReminds me of this semi-related classic that elaborates on the urge to rewrite things from scratch: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
- themerone 5y agoJoel never spent 6 months working on a very simple feature request that should have taken 5 minutes and a half dozen lines of code. I'd like to see him say with a straigh face that it is a good idea to stick with VB6 indefinately. There is a lot of wisdom in his post, but it isn't always practical or possible to evolve a legacy code base.
- xwolfi 5y agoEvery code base is legacy, in one dimension or another.
- christophilus 5y agoGoogle was a from-scratch rewrite of search engines. Facebook was a from-scratch rewrite of MySpace. Slack was a from-scratch rewrite of IRC. Chrome was a from-scratch rewrite of IE. The list goes on and on and on. Any of the previous incarnations of those ideas could have iterated into success, but it turns out it was easier to spin up a new product (even a completely new team / company / culture) with a clearer focus / path to improvement / culture than it was to turn around a barnacle-laden ship. Sometimes a rewrite / rethink is the best way forward.
- dchuk 5y agoThis is a wildly incorrect comment. Literally none of those were rewrites. It’s a completely different scenario to do greenfield implementations in existing categories vs managing the literal replacement of existing software with the same thing written in a different language.
- 5y ago
- makeitdouble 5y ago> Ultimately, however, our decision to switch was driven by our difficulty in hiring new talent for $UNREMARKABLE_LANGUAGE, despite it being taught in dozens of universities This was an actual pitch point to switch language and stack in a previous company. At some point the CTO+HR dept made the calculation that it would cost less in the long term to rewrite our services in a new language and bring in cheap/abundant devs, than to bring in more people familiar with the current stack and continue scaling it, as those had an higher average salary on the market.
- Trasmatta 5y agoThis also just came up recently at my company, that we should maybe rewrite because our technology hurts us in terms of recruiting... I'm not sure the people considering that realize how costly that decision would be. Is it really worth the millions and millions it would cost to rewrite into something considered more sexy? Probably multiple years of incremental work to get it done, and a massive hit to developer productivity and maintenance costs along the way. I'm also reminded of when Twitter claimed that it was Rails' fault that they didn't have better moderation tools. One of the most hilarious excuses I've ever heard.
- makeitdouble 5y agoThe not so hidden assumption that came with the pitch was that a bunch of the well-paid senior staff would leave for greener pastures (they wouldn't stick to maintaining a "legacy" stack). The savings were coming from both incoming and outgoing flow...
- Trasmatta 5y agoOr alternatively, there are some senior staff that are just plain bored with the current stack, and want the chance to play with something more exciting to them. Both are possibilities, depending on where the idea is originating.
- travisgriggs 5y ago
- xarope 5y agoI'm copying this template for my next CTO blog... . . . /s (/j?)
- awb 5y agoThis is akin to my pet peeve dev team blog post: We had to scale our $STANDARD_LANG application. Turns out it wasn’t fun. But you know what is fun? Writing tiny, non-essential MVPs in $SHINY_LANG. We haven’t tried scaling our $SHINY_LANG apps yet or deploying to production, but we’re excited about the future and we’re enjoying coding again!
- raverbashing 5y agoIt's even "funnier" how then they try to take $SHINY_LANG to its extremes and expect it to work flawlessly. And they don't try to understand it or work around it. "No optimizing, only performance." I remember some people getting bit by some Go stuff early on. Things take time. It will get there when it gets there. Then they come to HN and create a "why $technology sucks" when they a) didn't read the manual b) didn't match their requirements with the capabilities of the lang c) had unreal expectations Don't buy the shiniest Tesla then use it as your building contractor car. Especially when you like to overload the rear axis and pretend that's just not an issue.
- Thorentis 5y agoWe at $IRRELEVANT_DEV_BLOG wish we were as successful as $FAMOUS_COMPAMY
- hibikir 5y agoThe post is great, but it's important to remember it's only a first step in $Famous_company's story. Some rewrites are resume padding and PR to get more hires, and a talk a big conference, but are rather harmless. Others succeed, and were good ideas. But other times, the result is a big failure. One of my personal favorites involves a $Hyped_technology having a well defined trap that then leads us to another article, 1 to 2 years later, explaining how they migrated away from $Hyped_technology, often to something boring. But the really sad outcome is that $Hyped_technology is a big failure, but $Famous_company spent too much effort, and $Famous__technical_person too much of their social capital, to want to talk about it. Then all kinds of little startups that have heard the talks, read the blog posts, and then decide that if the solution was good enough for $Famous_company, it must be good enough for them!... except that it wasn't, and a lot of expensive engineers spent a whole lot of time making things work again, abandoning $Hyped_technology altogether. Unfortunately, the landmine documentation advertising the decision is still everywhere, including getting referred to by sales engineers of $Hyped_technology.
- jrs235 5y agoSimilar to the USDA/FDA and the push for the "low fat diet".
- WallowingInShit 5y agoExcept that wasn't a mistake, that was due to an intentional misinformation campaign.
- cudgy 5y agoSo are you saying that new technology is not hyped with misinformation? Write once run anywhere?
- funcDropShadow 5y agoWrite once run anywhere, was Java's slogan in the nineties. And I still find the amount of abstraction JVM provides fascinating. At least since it became well defined memory model, you can write complex pieces of software and they behave remarkable identical on a lot of different platforms. I am aware that the API border to the operating system has always been the weakest link regarding practical portability. But I wouldn't call that misinformation.
- lamontcg 5y agoYeah but everyone who learns $FLASHY_LANGUAGE and $HYPED_TECHNOLOGY can put that shit on their resumes and after they've driven the startup into the dust they can land a job at $FAMOUS_COMPANY. And really it'll be better for your career to embrace this and learn the tech stack by fucking up some unsuspecting startup and then bouncing somewhere big enough to actually use it.
- khazhoux 5y agoI love that it ends with “We are hiring.” All these stack write-ups are always either recruiting posts, or self-branding by the author.
- Terry_Roll 5y agoDoesnt say how much it cost. Anyone know?
- asicsp 5y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23144380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23144380 (1224 points | 2 years ago | 200 comments)
- muglug 5y agoThe mention of accessibility at the end reminds me of this very celebrated post from 2015: https://engineering.flipboard.com/2015/02/mobile-web https://engineering.flipboard.com/2015/02/mobile-web. The article described Flipboard's migration from a browser DOM-based app to an entirely canvas-rendered one, which made the whole thing invisible to screenreaders. There was just a throwaway line at the end on accesibility: "This area needs further exploration."
- aristofun 5y agoTo be fair i see more big companies stuck with outdated inefficient legacy technologies rather than companies evolving in line with technical progress. Booking.com, partially all of the faang etc. to name a few
- Arcanum-XIII 5y agoNot too sure about it. What I mean is that most of those software companies rise to the top in the last 20 years or so, and a lot of what is deemed worthwhile technology already existed at the time, be it Java, Ruby, Python or else. What did evolve is the arrival of the client side frameworks. It's a change, but is it better? I don't think there's enough evidence today to definitively say so.
- pjmlp 5y agoLove it, basically the core truth of most rewrites I have seen throughout my career.
- SPBS 5y agowhy was $FAMOUS_COMPANY lowercased to $Famous_company in the title? That's weird.
- theandrewbailey 5y agoHacker News eats titles sometimes.
- verinus 5y agoAt the core it's what I see as a threefold conflict of interests: individual developer vs. product vs. organization individual devs have to stay relevant, learn new technologies to up their market vaule products want a simple, reliable and working solution, not some new, but well known technology organizations want tech to be homogeneous over more then one product to be able to shift devs around, reuse know-how etc.
- kokizzu2 5y agoI keep the list btw XD http://kokizzu.blogspot.com/2016/12/list-of-tech-migrations.html http://kokizzu.blogspot.com/2016/12/list-of-tech-migrations....
- kokizzu2 5y agoor github repo, just in case someone want to add https://github.com/kokizzu/list-of-tech-migrations/ https://github.com/kokizzu/list-of-tech-migrations/
- thefilmore 5y agoVery cool!
- otabdeveloper4 5y agoAnd by 'switched' we mean, of course, 'rewrote this little-used module of our Big Ball of Mud, there by increasing the total area of mud in our architecture'.
- jgimenez 5y agoDid I hear Rust?
- Blackstrat 5y agoSums up the last two years of employment prior to my 'job elimination'. The company was acquired by a VC who brought in a new CIO. Everything was the cloud, webservices, etc. I contended that a stable application with 99%+ uptime, a team of six developers, and peak concurrent users of less than 10K was not an optimal candidate for webservices. We had had the application load tested by a very reputable firm and they asserted the platform could sustain nearly a million concurrent users. Given the nature of the business, even a 100 million customers would not lead to that level of concurrency. Typically, our concurrent users peaked at 0.3% of our customer base. So I have been comfortably retired for the last two years. And the company? Well, they 'deprecated' the application and leased a 3rd party solution that had all the right buzz words on their marketing material. So it goes.
- iostream23 5y agoExcept it ain’t satire! Cue argument about non typed scripting languages with garbage collection not belonging on long running server processes, etc… “There’s this thing called the stack, a request response cycle fits inside it and actually http is stateless probably due to contemporary stack limits” I agree, and found the article funny.