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> What's especially hard about new things? Because it doesn't exist yet, you need to investigate previous approaches/research, come up with architecture/design

> What's especially hard about new things? Because it doesn't exist yet, you need to investigate previous approaches/research, come up with architecture/design, evaluate pros/cons, hardware requirements, staffing and so on. When things become clear, it is easy to build it. Support is harder in the sense that it takes a lot of time and digging into the platform to understand how can you solve it, but for a small gain (0.5% users will not see this issue again, unless you introduced new bug). Imagine solving 100 different support tickets, you need to solve at least 10 of them to start seeing the pattern, if there is any, to come up with generic solution. But at the time you solve 100 tickets, someone with experience can build solution which can make your product obsolete. Support vs new has different trade-offs. - Support -> takes more time and persistence, very small incremental improvements (88% -> 88.4%,..). But happy customers - New thing -> takes more time on how to approach the problem, after problem/solution is clear, much faster to build for 85% cases

JohnFen 4y ago
I think there's a personality aspect to it as well. I've noticed that some programmers live for the front-end of a project. When you have a clean slate, are doing design, developing the data structures, approaches, all of that creative stuff. By the time the project is mature and the big problems have been resolved, they tire of it and want to move on to another new thing. But there are others who hate that front-end stuff. They love taking a mature product and maintaining it. Debugging, adding new features, etc. A successful product absolutely requires both kinds of people. A company who devalues one or the other is a company that is shooting itself in the foot.
xorcist 4y ago
Maybe support isn't a great word here. Maintaining software goes way beyond just supporting someone. Staffing and hardware requirements aren't terribly important for greenfield development without any users yet. New products can be brittle and constantly in flux and that's probably ok. Actually scaling the product once it exists and have users, building out new features without disturbing existing workflows, that's the hard work. Which do you think is harder, inventing twitter as the fail whale product, or going from that to a hundred million users without disturbing the customers you got? I can't imagine the difficulties can even compare.

JohnFen 4y ago

I think there's a personality aspect to it as well. I've noticed that some programmers live for the front-end of a project. When you have a clean slate, are doing design, developing the data structures, approaches, all of that creative stuff. By the time the project is mature and the big problems have been resolved, they tire of it and want to move on to another new thing. But there are others who hate that front-end stuff. They love taking a mature product and maintaining it. Debugging, adding new features, etc. A successful product absolutely requires both kinds of people. A company who devalues one or the other is a company that is shooting itself in the foot.

xorcist 4y ago

Maybe support isn't a great word here. Maintaining software goes way beyond just supporting someone. Staffing and hardware requirements aren't terribly important for greenfield development without any users yet. New products can be brittle and constantly in flux and that's probably ok. Actually scaling the product once it exists and have users, building out new features without disturbing existing workflows, that's the hard work. Which do you think is harder, inventing twitter as the fail whale product, or going from that to a hundred million users without disturbing the customers you got? I can't imagine the difficulties can even compare.