6 ms·

The problem is that if a company advertises a job that is all about maintaing one or two monolithic applications without K8s, distributed system topics, tracing

by danwee 4y ago

The problem is that if a company advertises a job that is all about maintaing one or two monolithic applications without K8s, distributed system topics, tracing, microservices, AWS/GCP, etc., well, then not many engineers will apply. That's actually a paradox in itself: my bet is that only a few group of (good) engineers would apply to such a job. Management otherwise usually thinks that the bigger the pool of applicants, the better for the company. Also, a lot of engineers out there are resume-driven: they do want to work with microservices, the cloud and k8s. It's a vicious circle.

raxxorraxor 4y ago
> then not many engineers will apply I would. I don't run server farms and don't need to provision entire environments so K8s would be extreme overkill for anything I do. Docker makes sense to formally define system requirements but even that I use sparingly. I develop embedded systems though and usually only trace coffee machines. I do host stuff on AWS and gladly use all the services they provide. Neat, easy and less maintenance, but the most important thing for me personally is that I work with an account that doesn't use my own credit card. I can understand the applicants though, there is a fear to commit to solutions where any experience might not increase their market value. But from my experience that fear is highly exaggerated. There are people that reject candidates on these accounts but usually not the good one that know they need to invest in engineers. There are also quite a few bosses that are only interested in the newest tech. They have absolutely no idea what that means, but they will buy it. And a lot of cloud software hits the sweet spot for them.
- tluyben2 4y ago
  > > then not many engineers will apply I would. Like you said ; one point is probably market value and another future relevance. I have had discussions with hiring managers lately and almost none that I talked to actually use most or any of the buzzwords they put in their ads. They just say they do to get more applications.
mwcampbell 4y ago
How broadly is this true? Some of us developers do want to focus on things that are useful to people, that we can describe to non-tech people we meet in public. Are those of us who run bootstrapped, all-remote SaaS companies going to have trouble hiring?
- danwee 4y ago
  Based on my experience: - many frontend engineers would run away from companies that hire for jQuery skills. Frontend engineers nowadays usually want to write React and use Vercel and what not (even though the product may only require jQuery) - many backend engineers would run away from companies that hire for PHP. Backende engineers nowadays usually want to write Python/Go/Kotlin/Java, well, anything except PHP, even though modern PHP is well-suited for most SaaS/web-products - many infrastructure engineers would only apply for companies that use K8s, modern CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub/GitLab) and cloud providers (e.g., AWS, GCP) and run away from anything that smells like on-prem installations using Ansible/Chef/custom bash scripts, even though the vast majority of web products out there do not need K8s/AWS/Terraform/etc. I think in general, engineers do want to build useful stuff for people but only if they get to play with the coolest tech.
  - mwcampbell 4y ago
    All right, you got me. I've eschewed PHP for almost 20 years. And I don't use jQuery in new code either, though I do sometimes use plain, framework-less JavaScript, which in modern browsers provides a lot of the functionality of jQuery but with no runtime overhead. I wouldn't disqualify a candidate for being primarily experienced with jQuery, and I'd be curious to see their modern PHP.
  - bluefirebrand 4y ago
    > even though modern PHP is well-suited for most SaaS/web-products Maybe, but is it pleasant to use? My memories of PHP are not fond at all, it is a really miserable language to write. Maybe it has the features it needs but is it actually nice to use? Same with JQuery. There's a lot of rose colored glasses these days for JQuery, imo. It is not fun to write. Also the complexity lift to use React versus using JQuery is minor compared to the complexity lift distributed K8s microservices have over an NGinx server with a custom bash script. The extra complexity of the scalable microservices architecture might be sufficient to actually sink your startup. The extra complexity of using React over JQuery costs... Essentially nothing. Edit: I guess what I'm really saying is that choosing a different backend technology or frontend framework isn't remotely the same as choosing to build a scalable distributed microservice architecture over a static bare metal server. Choosing a technology is a choice based on what you want to work with and what you think you can hire other people to work with. Choosing K8s terraform distributed microservices for scalability early on is the most premature optimization you can possibly make. Get a customer before thinking about scaling.
estsauver 4y ago
You really don't want to hire those engineers though? We really explicitly hire for judgement, and while those all might be a good judgement for the business some day, they aren't today, and an engineer who doesn't get that is way more of a liability for the business.
tluyben2 4y ago
What I find more worrying is that incubators and VCs now often push it. One of a disturbing metric for a known incubator (cannot name them) is how fast you burn through your free $100k aws budget; if you don't do it fast enough, it is a metric for failure as far as they are concerned. And I see this a lot; this push to pump massive amounts in stuff that's not needed and probably never will be needed.
nerdponx 4y ago
Good! Let the people who want to over-engineer their systems self-select into companies with over-engineered systems.
spaetzleesser 4y ago
"The problem is that if a company advertises a job that is all about maintaing one or two monolithic applications without K8s, distributed system topics, tracing, microservices, AWS/GCP, etc., well, then not many engineers will apply. " Also: if you are an engineer that has managed to run successful systems for years but didn't use microservices, K8s, AWS and all the other stuff you shouldn't even bother to apply for many jobs because you are "not up-to-date". Heck, reading the job ads from my company even they probably wouldn't hire me or a lot of my colleagues if we applied.

by danwee 4y ago

raxxorraxor 4y ago

> then not many engineers will apply I would. I don't run server farms and don't need to provision entire environments so K8s would be extreme overkill for anything I do. Docker makes sense to formally define system requirements but even that I use sparingly. I develop embedded systems though and usually only trace coffee machines. I do host stuff on AWS and gladly use all the services they provide. Neat, easy and less maintenance, but the most important thing for me personally is that I work with an account that doesn't use my own credit card. I can understand the applicants though, there is a fear to commit to solutions where any experience might not increase their market value. But from my experience that fear is highly exaggerated. There are people that reject candidates on these accounts but usually not the good one that know they need to invest in engineers. There are also quite a few bosses that are only interested in the newest tech. They have absolutely no idea what that means, but they will buy it. And a lot of cloud software hits the sweet spot for them.

tluyben2 4y ago
> > then not many engineers will apply I would. Like you said ; one point is probably market value and another future relevance. I have had discussions with hiring managers lately and almost none that I talked to actually use most or any of the buzzwords they put in their ads. They just say they do to get more applications.

mwcampbell 4y ago

How broadly is this true? Some of us developers do want to focus on things that are useful to people, that we can describe to non-tech people we meet in public. Are those of us who run bootstrapped, all-remote SaaS companies going to have trouble hiring?

danwee 4y ago
Based on my experience: - many frontend engineers would run away from companies that hire for jQuery skills. Frontend engineers nowadays usually want to write React and use Vercel and what not (even though the product may only require jQuery) - many backend engineers would run away from companies that hire for PHP. Backende engineers nowadays usually want to write Python/Go/Kotlin/Java, well, anything except PHP, even though modern PHP is well-suited for most SaaS/web-products - many infrastructure engineers would only apply for companies that use K8s, modern CI/CD pipelines (e.g., GitHub/GitLab) and cloud providers (e.g., AWS, GCP) and run away from anything that smells like on-prem installations using Ansible/Chef/custom bash scripts, even though the vast majority of web products out there do not need K8s/AWS/Terraform/etc. I think in general, engineers do want to build useful stuff for people but only if they get to play with the coolest tech.
- mwcampbell 4y ago
  All right, you got me. I've eschewed PHP for almost 20 years. And I don't use jQuery in new code either, though I do sometimes use plain, framework-less JavaScript, which in modern browsers provides a lot of the functionality of jQuery but with no runtime overhead. I wouldn't disqualify a candidate for being primarily experienced with jQuery, and I'd be curious to see their modern PHP.
- bluefirebrand 4y ago
  > even though modern PHP is well-suited for most SaaS/web-products Maybe, but is it pleasant to use? My memories of PHP are not fond at all, it is a really miserable language to write. Maybe it has the features it needs but is it actually nice to use? Same with JQuery. There's a lot of rose colored glasses these days for JQuery, imo. It is not fun to write. Also the complexity lift to use React versus using JQuery is minor compared to the complexity lift distributed K8s microservices have over an NGinx server with a custom bash script. The extra complexity of the scalable microservices architecture might be sufficient to actually sink your startup. The extra complexity of using React over JQuery costs... Essentially nothing. Edit: I guess what I'm really saying is that choosing a different backend technology or frontend framework isn't remotely the same as choosing to build a scalable distributed microservice architecture over a static bare metal server. Choosing a technology is a choice based on what you want to work with and what you think you can hire other people to work with. Choosing K8s terraform distributed microservices for scalability early on is the most premature optimization you can possibly make. Get a customer before thinking about scaling.

estsauver 4y ago

You really don't want to hire those engineers though? We really explicitly hire for judgement, and while those all might be a good judgement for the business some day, they aren't today, and an engineer who doesn't get that is way more of a liability for the business.

tluyben2 4y ago

What I find more worrying is that incubators and VCs now often push it. One of a disturbing metric for a known incubator (cannot name them) is how fast you burn through your free $100k aws budget; if you don't do it fast enough, it is a metric for failure as far as they are concerned. And I see this a lot; this push to pump massive amounts in stuff that's not needed and probably never will be needed.

nerdponx 4y ago

Good! Let the people who want to over-engineer their systems self-select into companies with over-engineered systems.

spaetzleesser 4y ago

"The problem is that if a company advertises a job that is all about maintaing one or two monolithic applications without K8s, distributed system topics, tracing, microservices, AWS/GCP, etc., well, then not many engineers will apply. " Also: if you are an engineer that has managed to run successful systems for years but didn't use microservices, K8s, AWS and all the other stuff you shouldn't even bother to apply for many jobs because you are "not up-to-date". Heck, reading the job ads from my company even they probably wouldn't hire me or a lot of my colleagues if we applied.