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Is this what it's like down in SV? You folks have enough money flying around willy-nilly to just build out untested architectures at a whim for unestablished b

by munk-a 5y ago

Is this what it's like down in SV? You folks have enough money flying around willy-nilly to just build out untested architectures at a whim for unestablished businesses? In the companies I've worked for architectural discussions are taken extremely seriously, we research and discuss how different approaches to solving problems has turned out for other folks and we might even run a pilot or two where we do a small scale demo to feel out the pluses and minuses. Complexity without sufficient justification can't survive in most established businesses - a research budget certainly can, and you can use that research budget to explore options - but if you want to rewrite the codebase into a different paradigm you need to clearly demonstrate what we'll be getting out of it. That might be performance, maintainability, hireability (i.e. most local new grads are trained up in this paradigm), feature support or something else, but you need to show the benefit - I think it's a good idea to be skeptical of historical decisions, a lot of decisions early on in a company's history are made arbitrarily and sort of assumed because the momentum is on their side - you definitely should fight against that momentum and reject bad conventions but... switching to a hip new tech just for complexities sake - I have no idea how I'd ever sell that to higher ups as a project initiative and I've sold executed two framework switches (no framework to a now defunct framework to a now healthy framework) and several major data model changes (one that took about ten man years of labour). When you've got a green field you're making decisions left and right, and some of those will be made arbitrarily - but the big commitments should be well contemplated in advance.

no-s 5y ago
>but if you want to rewrite the codebase into a different paradigm you need to clearly demonstrate what we'll be getting out of it. Well, that all seems reasonable until that upstart competitor comes along and upends the market with simpler stuff that doesn’t require so much bondage and discipline and tithe to process religion suppliers, and the customers start to question the value you’re supplying and wham, all that orderly process and framing is like out the window, man, like man the lifeboats. It’s a pain to stay in the game when it seems like change for changes’ sake and there’s no time to sit down and reason through a business case before the next new shiny hits. Stupid but true. I still remember Digital trying to sell me maintenance contracts for 20 year old PDP-11s still in service out in the field. We rebuilt our entire infrastructure from scratch on new software and hardware in less than a year for 2/3rds the cost of the annual maintenance contract...the next year those pretty wood paneled Digital offices with executive dining rooms had "for lease" signs out front. Digital had failed the paradigm shift.
lmeyerov 5y ago
Yes, most recently, any barnacle that can be stapled onto the monstrosity that is the Modern Data Stack. Before then, for Kubernetes. Before then, for the Hadoop ecosystem. (These all have value -- even we work here -- but the ecosystems can't possibly support all the co's in each.) For whatever the things of the year, a VC team will fund say 20 startups with the hope that 1-2 do well.. and are ok for the rest to flop. It's expected that 18-19 we're bad ideas, but they all still get giant sales/marketing/engineering staffs that 99% co's won't in order for the VC to have it get a go and then find out which is the winner. That is why you especially shouldn't trust speakers, marketers, and sales staff from a VC co: the financials show it's 95% chance to not be as advertised and then disappear on you in some financial shell game.

by munk-a 5y ago

no-s 5y ago

>but if you want to rewrite the codebase into a different paradigm you need to clearly demonstrate what we'll be getting out of it. Well, that all seems reasonable until that upstart competitor comes along and upends the market with simpler stuff that doesn’t require so much bondage and discipline and tithe to process religion suppliers, and the customers start to question the value you’re supplying and wham, all that orderly process and framing is like out the window, man, like man the lifeboats. It’s a pain to stay in the game when it seems like change for changes’ sake and there’s no time to sit down and reason through a business case before the next new shiny hits. Stupid but true. I still remember Digital trying to sell me maintenance contracts for 20 year old PDP-11s still in service out in the field. We rebuilt our entire infrastructure from scratch on new software and hardware in less than a year for 2/3rds the cost of the annual maintenance contract...the next year those pretty wood paneled Digital offices with executive dining rooms had "for lease" signs out front. Digital had failed the paradigm shift.

lmeyerov 5y ago

Yes, most recently, any barnacle that can be stapled onto the monstrosity that is the Modern Data Stack. Before then, for Kubernetes. Before then, for the Hadoop ecosystem. (These all have value -- even we work here -- but the ecosystems can't possibly support all the co's in each.) For whatever the things of the year, a VC team will fund say 20 startups with the hope that 1-2 do well.. and are ok for the rest to flop. It's expected that 18-19 we're bad ideas, but they all still get giant sales/marketing/engineering staffs that 99% co's won't in order for the VC to have it get a go and then find out which is the winner. That is why you especially shouldn't trust speakers, marketers, and sales staff from a VC co: the financials show it's 95% chance to not be as advertised and then disappear on you in some financial shell game.