6 ms·

I think this is a bit naive. Startup founders do not care about providing careers for engineers, and usually want to stop being a "startup founder" as soon as t

I think this is a bit naive. Startup founders do not care about providing careers for engineers, and usually want to stop being a "startup founder" as soon as they possibly can - they are chasing huge exits and being a founder is incredibly stressful. The real reason that microservices are so prevalent is that they became fashionable, for exactly the same reason a particular item or brand of clothing becomes fashionable - influential people were seen using them and so regular people aspired to start using them too. At a certain point in the popularity curve, _not_ using microservices becomes a controversial viewpoint. They also suffer from being what I call "conceptual crack". There is a certain kind of idea that really tickles some kinds of engineer's brains. Microservices seem like a such a clean solution, each service having its own single responsibility, so easy to draw on a whiteboard, so neat and tidy. Other ideas I place in this category are blockchain, redux, and V=f(s). Clean and tidy ideas that are compelling conceptually but result in nightmarish levels of hidden complexity when they're put into practice.

metadat 5y ago
What is V=f(s) ?
- phpnode 5y ago
  View = Function(State), the original idea behind React. I use React every day, and I enjoy it, but it hides nightmarish complexity to preserve a semblance of this original, neat and tidy idea.
  - mekkkkkk 5y ago
    How do you mean that this causes 'nightmarish complexity'? I guess it's true if you measure the amount of complexity that powers the framework, but the visible API's, the resulting project structure and the implementation itself is incredibly simple and versatile. I'd say it's one of my favorite properties of component frameworks as opposed to raw element modification, templating solutions or classical MVC.
    - phpnode 5y ago
      I'm not criticising the idea or the framework, but the react team have had to go to enormous lengths to make that one simple idea work. And the community have had to embrace (and then sometimes, forget) some pretty controversial techniques and concepts in that time, with more big changes coming soon (hello concurrent mode!). It has cost FB tens of millions of dollars to develop. I'm not saying that investment hasn't been worth it, but peek under the hood and the complexity is huge.
      - mekkkkkk 5y ago
        Alright, I agree completely. But I still don't see how it causes the same issues as microservices does. It is definitely conceptual crack (which is a genius term btw), but it isn't an ominous foot gun the same way the allure of microservices is. EDIT: Oh I get it, you aren't talking at all about the consequences for the implementers. Only the massive effort required to turn the alluring V=f(S) into the React we have today. Got it.
    - MathCodeLove 5y ago
      They didn't say it causes the complexity, just that React hides a lot of complexity away. React is very simple and easy to use on it's surface, but it an incredibly complex collection of software under the hood.
  - seanp2k2 5y ago
    It's funny, before I knew about React (this was ~2014), I wrote a ~7ksloc webapp with jquery and underscore that also just used memory for state and triggered a re-render of things when inputs changed. I haven't dug into how React works at a deep level lately, but at the time, for my relatively simple thing (basically did a few pivot tables worth of calculations for some financial stuff), it wasn't really that complex. I'm sure that enough engineers working on a framework for a decade can make it very complex, just wondering, as I do with many mature pieces of software, if a ground-up rewrite based on the same concept but knowing what they all know now would look drastically different from the latest dev build.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Nextgrid 5y ago
Startup founders don't care about providing careers per-se, but they care about the clout and connections that comes from founding a company with 100+ engineers mentioned at every cloud provider's conference as opposed to a scrappy garage with 3 greybeards hacking away Perl code running on rusty bare-metal. CTOs and engineering managers care about their own visibility at said cloud provider's conference so it gives them bonus points for their next gig. Individual contributors want to take the place of the aforementioned engineering manager/CTO so they'll double-down and learn the current stack and "best practices". They may not even be aware that there's any other way or how unefficient it is, as they've started their career during this madness. If any of those people have stock options, keeping low and going with the flow is a sensible strategy if they don't want to lose them by getting pushed out for speaking against the groupthink. There's rarely explicit malice involved at any specific stage - it's a market-level problem. The music will stop at some point though and we'll see a readjustment.
michaelt 5y ago
> Startup founders do not care about providing careers for engineers, and usually want to stop being a "startup founder" as soon as they possibly can - they are chasing huge exits and being a founder is incredibly stressful. Imagine you were the founder of a business you've now realised... isn't going to be the next Google. Your product hasn't failed! By some metrics it's very successful! You've got investors who value your company at $10 billion, and they're ready to loan you $1 billion. But also, you've never made a profit, you've tried the most likely routes to profitability without success, similar businesses have suffered sudden implosions, and you'd have gone bankrupt years ago if it weren't for the fact there's chumps who'll work for you for free. You've got no plan for how to pay back that $1 billion. But so long as you keep your mouth shut about that last paragraph, and accept the $1 billion? You get a high-status job, a thousand-person empire, and a fat compensation package. 1000 of your colleagues stay employed too. Why would anyone climb off that gravy train?
- epolanski 5y ago
  > Why would anyone climb off that gravy train? Decency?
  - revolvingocelot 5y ago
    The decent would have been selected against at the paragraph-about-which-one-keeps-one's-mouth-shut stage, if not before.
  - _carbyau_ 5y ago
    A University near me has a Master of Business Administration (MBA) course that includes "Corporate Ethics". Can you believe it? The audacity! A business charging business people, for a course of knowledge both sides know they will never use...
  - szundi 5y ago
    Ha ha ha
- CityOfThrowaway 5y ago
  I'm sorry... what? This scenario you've described is such a stretch that in all likelihood it has never happened.
philosopher1234 5y ago
>they are chasing huge exits and being a founder is incredibly stressful. Are they really? I think they're workaholics chasing an escape. True success is the worst outcome they could imagine, because then they'd have to tend to the rest of their life. Why be a serial founder, if its so horrible and stressful? Why keep working yourself to death after your first $10M, $100M, or $1B? Why is it never enough? People have self-destructive instincts that are disguised in socially acceptable (or worse, praised!) forms. We shouldn't ignore the actions of founders when trying to make sense of their words.
pmoriarty 5y ago
"Startup founders do not care about providing careers for engineers, and usually want to stop being a "startup founder" as soon as they possibly can - they are chasing huge exits and being a founder is incredibly stressful." If that's true, I'd like someone to explain Craigslist.
- djbusby 5y ago
  Not a Startup, didn't follow Startup trajectory. They were building a tidy little business - except they moved past the little part. When you start, you choose between investors+growth=exit or profitable+steady=tidy Greatly simplified of course but Craigslist chose the second path.
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    "Not a Startup, didn't follow Startup trajectory." Every company was once a startup.
    - djbusby 5y ago
      Disagree. A Startup is a company designed to grow and scale fast (according to my investor friends) A small business is one designed to be tidy. All business start but not every one that starts is a Startup. Include tangent here about Lean Startup vs Startup. Also, I'm using Startup which is different than startup - the Proper Casing I think implies the Venture-to-Exit part. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup_company https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup_company
- bathtub365 5y ago
  An outlier that predates the modern SV scene
whoomp12342 5y ago
meh, I think its propaganda from major cloud providers. its hard to do microservices well without all their tools which is $$$

metadat 5y ago

What is V=f(s) ?

phpnode 5y ago
View = Function(State), the original idea behind React. I use React every day, and I enjoy it, but it hides nightmarish complexity to preserve a semblance of this original, neat and tidy idea.
- mekkkkkk 5y ago
  How do you mean that this causes 'nightmarish complexity'? I guess it's true if you measure the amount of complexity that powers the framework, but the visible API's, the resulting project structure and the implementation itself is incredibly simple and versatile. I'd say it's one of my favorite properties of component frameworks as opposed to raw element modification, templating solutions or classical MVC.
  - phpnode 5y ago
    I'm not criticising the idea or the framework, but the react team have had to go to enormous lengths to make that one simple idea work. And the community have had to embrace (and then sometimes, forget) some pretty controversial techniques and concepts in that time, with more big changes coming soon (hello concurrent mode!). It has cost FB tens of millions of dollars to develop. I'm not saying that investment hasn't been worth it, but peek under the hood and the complexity is huge.
    - mekkkkkk 5y ago
      Alright, I agree completely. But I still don't see how it causes the same issues as microservices does. It is definitely conceptual crack (which is a genius term btw), but it isn't an ominous foot gun the same way the allure of microservices is. EDIT: Oh I get it, you aren't talking at all about the consequences for the implementers. Only the massive effort required to turn the alluring V=f(S) into the React we have today. Got it.
  - MathCodeLove 5y ago
    They didn't say it causes the complexity, just that React hides a lot of complexity away. React is very simple and easy to use on it's surface, but it an incredibly complex collection of software under the hood.
- seanp2k2 5y ago
  It's funny, before I knew about React (this was ~2014), I wrote a ~7ksloc webapp with jquery and underscore that also just used memory for state and triggered a re-render of things when inputs changed. I haven't dug into how React works at a deep level lately, but at the time, for my relatively simple thing (basically did a few pivot tables worth of calculations for some financial stuff), it wasn't really that complex. I'm sure that enough engineers working on a framework for a decade can make it very complex, just wondering, as I do with many mature pieces of software, if a ground-up rewrite based on the same concept but knowing what they all know now would look drastically different from the latest dev build.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Nextgrid 5y ago

Startup founders don't care about providing careers per-se, but they care about the clout and connections that comes from founding a company with 100+ engineers mentioned at every cloud provider's conference as opposed to a scrappy garage with 3 greybeards hacking away Perl code running on rusty bare-metal. CTOs and engineering managers care about their own visibility at said cloud provider's conference so it gives them bonus points for their next gig. Individual contributors want to take the place of the aforementioned engineering manager/CTO so they'll double-down and learn the current stack and "best practices". They may not even be aware that there's any other way or how unefficient it is, as they've started their career during this madness. If any of those people have stock options, keeping low and going with the flow is a sensible strategy if they don't want to lose them by getting pushed out for speaking against the groupthink. There's rarely explicit malice involved at any specific stage - it's a market-level problem. The music will stop at some point though and we'll see a readjustment.

michaelt 5y ago

> Startup founders do not care about providing careers for engineers, and usually want to stop being a "startup founder" as soon as they possibly can - they are chasing huge exits and being a founder is incredibly stressful. Imagine you were the founder of a business you've now realised... isn't going to be the next Google. Your product hasn't failed! By some metrics it's very successful! You've got investors who value your company at $10 billion, and they're ready to loan you $1 billion. But also, you've never made a profit, you've tried the most likely routes to profitability without success, similar businesses have suffered sudden implosions, and you'd have gone bankrupt years ago if it weren't for the fact there's chumps who'll work for you for free. You've got no plan for how to pay back that $1 billion. But so long as you keep your mouth shut about that last paragraph, and accept the $1 billion? You get a high-status job, a thousand-person empire, and a fat compensation package. 1000 of your colleagues stay employed too. Why would anyone climb off that gravy train?

epolanski 5y ago
> Why would anyone climb off that gravy train? Decency?
- revolvingocelot 5y ago
  The decent would have been selected against at the paragraph-about-which-one-keeps-one's-mouth-shut stage, if not before.
- _carbyau_ 5y ago
  A University near me has a Master of Business Administration (MBA) course that includes "Corporate Ethics". Can you believe it? The audacity! A business charging business people, for a course of knowledge both sides know they will never use...
- szundi 5y ago
  Ha ha ha
CityOfThrowaway 5y ago
I'm sorry... what? This scenario you've described is such a stretch that in all likelihood it has never happened.

philosopher1234 5y ago

>they are chasing huge exits and being a founder is incredibly stressful. Are they really? I think they're workaholics chasing an escape. True success is the worst outcome they could imagine, because then they'd have to tend to the rest of their life. Why be a serial founder, if its so horrible and stressful? Why keep working yourself to death after your first $10M, $100M, or $1B? Why is it never enough? People have self-destructive instincts that are disguised in socially acceptable (or worse, praised!) forms. We shouldn't ignore the actions of founders when trying to make sense of their words.

pmoriarty 5y ago

"Startup founders do not care about providing careers for engineers, and usually want to stop being a "startup founder" as soon as they possibly can - they are chasing huge exits and being a founder is incredibly stressful." If that's true, I'd like someone to explain Craigslist.

djbusby 5y ago
Not a Startup, didn't follow Startup trajectory. They were building a tidy little business - except they moved past the little part. When you start, you choose between investors+growth=exit or profitable+steady=tidy Greatly simplified of course but Craigslist chose the second path.
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  "Not a Startup, didn't follow Startup trajectory." Every company was once a startup.
  - djbusby 5y ago
    Disagree. A Startup is a company designed to grow and scale fast (according to my investor friends) A small business is one designed to be tidy. All business start but not every one that starts is a Startup. Include tangent here about Lean Startup vs Startup. Also, I'm using Startup which is different than startup - the Proper Casing I think implies the Venture-to-Exit part. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup_company https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup_company
bathtub365 5y ago
An outlier that predates the modern SV scene

whoomp12342 5y ago

meh, I think its propaganda from major cloud providers. its hard to do microservices well without all their tools which is $$$