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> Actually your comment is a great demonstration of poor engineering leadership. You've already decided on an outcome and are shifting the narrative to adhere t

by mk89 3y ago

> Actually your comment is a great demonstration of poor engineering leadership. You've already decided on an outcome and are shifting the narrative to adhere to this outcome. For me it's actually the decision of a CTO of one of top 10 companies in the world in terms of software size/value/etc. to push it down to very smart people - that's bad leadership. Why? Because I guess this thing didn't go as planned - a self fulfilling prophecy that shows how awesome serverless is. It backfired in a period where people are questioning whether all these megahypes are not actually just some marketing. Yes, he is responsible for that, for pushing it down to his people that "everything new must be started with serverless" first. When actually in some situations, as the article showed, a monolith or a (big) microservice would do the job better. Why the hell hire super smart people when you have to tell them how to do things?

hyperhopper 3y ago
> Why the hell hire super smart people when you have to tell them how to do things? A very hard question. One side is that every smart engineer will do what's best for their use case. The other is now you might have 100 smart engineers with 100 smart different solutions which can cause repeated work, integration issues, missed common solutions, etc. Both approaches have lots of pros cons and tradeoffs
- jpgvm 3y ago
  Generally the best approach there is to elevate a bunch of your smartest engineers into an architecture team that a) set good standards but also b) appreciates the nuance of problems sufficiently to know when to deviate. A small team can probably only handle one tech stack, an org with 10 teams can probably handle 10 stacks if they needed to but can get efficiency by standardising on some number less than 10. However making those calls shouldn't be coming down from the CTO, it should be made among the architects that actually design and build the systems.
  - phil-m 3y ago
    Where I'd consider a (good) CTO should be somehow responsible for the high-level architectural decisions. Accumulate enough expertise and know-how (via "architects" or rather very senior engineers) and then discuss the pros/cons and at the end weigh each argument and decide what may work best.
- j45 3y ago
  The smart have to design for the average of devs and not the smartest. The smart design for easily creating beginners in thenfuture to work with what exists. Too often smart devs have to be clever with coding, where clever architecture can often be more flexible.
ec109685 3y ago
Those smart engineers should be encouraged to devote their brainpower to other aspects of the business and technology stack. Far too often teams use an opportunity to build something new as a science project to use all the latest wiz bang cloud features when the boring stack would work just fine. For those that truly want to innovate on that aspect of the stack, they should be part of a central infrastructure team, whose job it is to build scalable solutions for the group.
- echelon 3y ago
  You can hire anyone for postgres and k8s. Not so much the fancy new hotness that will be weirdware in three years.
  - robocat 3y ago
    Replying to your deleted comment on another thread: IMHO if possible, grow your business without investors and retain control. Jason Cohen has an amazing talk on bootstrapping, with some very solid advice from his own experiences: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=otbnC2zE2rw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=otbnC2zE2rw Look at co-working spaces near you? Our business worked in an incubator for a bit, and the problems we saw with investors in other startups were eye-watering. We retained 100% ownership, and that was the right decision for us. Learn from the mistakes of others at different stages just by being around them. Flick through my previous comments on VC for external links that explain my points better: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=robocat%20vc&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... I was a founder, and I don’t know shit about VC except through reading, so be appropriately skeptical about my thoughts and only take what is of value for your circumstances. Here’s a post that turned up this morning on Angel investors: https://open.substack.com/pub/colingardiner/p/what-to-look-for-in-an-angel-investor https://open.substack.com/pub/colingardiner/p/what-to-look-f... Beware: the VC model and the whole industry can at times be parasitic, self-serving, and definitely has vibes of Ponzi or pyramid schemes, and the worst excesses are hidden from view if you are not in the industry. Good fortune.

by mk89 3y ago

hyperhopper 3y ago

> Why the hell hire super smart people when you have to tell them how to do things? A very hard question. One side is that every smart engineer will do what's best for their use case. The other is now you might have 100 smart engineers with 100 smart different solutions which can cause repeated work, integration issues, missed common solutions, etc. Both approaches have lots of pros cons and tradeoffs

jpgvm 3y ago
Generally the best approach there is to elevate a bunch of your smartest engineers into an architecture team that a) set good standards but also b) appreciates the nuance of problems sufficiently to know when to deviate. A small team can probably only handle one tech stack, an org with 10 teams can probably handle 10 stacks if they needed to but can get efficiency by standardising on some number less than 10. However making those calls shouldn't be coming down from the CTO, it should be made among the architects that actually design and build the systems.
- phil-m 3y ago
  Where I'd consider a (good) CTO should be somehow responsible for the high-level architectural decisions. Accumulate enough expertise and know-how (via "architects" or rather very senior engineers) and then discuss the pros/cons and at the end weigh each argument and decide what may work best.
j45 3y ago
The smart have to design for the average of devs and not the smartest. The smart design for easily creating beginners in thenfuture to work with what exists. Too often smart devs have to be clever with coding, where clever architecture can often be more flexible.

ec109685 3y ago

Those smart engineers should be encouraged to devote their brainpower to other aspects of the business and technology stack. Far too often teams use an opportunity to build something new as a science project to use all the latest wiz bang cloud features when the boring stack would work just fine. For those that truly want to innovate on that aspect of the stack, they should be part of a central infrastructure team, whose job it is to build scalable solutions for the group.

echelon 3y ago
You can hire anyone for postgres and k8s. Not so much the fancy new hotness that will be weirdware in three years.
- robocat 3y ago
  Replying to your deleted comment on another thread: IMHO if possible, grow your business without investors and retain control. Jason Cohen has an amazing talk on bootstrapping, with some very solid advice from his own experiences: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=otbnC2zE2rw https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=otbnC2zE2rw Look at co-working spaces near you? Our business worked in an incubator for a bit, and the problems we saw with investors in other startups were eye-watering. We retained 100% ownership, and that was the right decision for us. Learn from the mistakes of others at different stages just by being around them. Flick through my previous comments on VC for external links that explain my points better: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=robocat%20vc&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... I was a founder, and I don’t know shit about VC except through reading, so be appropriately skeptical about my thoughts and only take what is of value for your circumstances. Here’s a post that turned up this morning on Angel investors: https://open.substack.com/pub/colingardiner/p/what-to-look-for-in-an-angel-investor https://open.substack.com/pub/colingardiner/p/what-to-look-f... Beware: the VC model and the whole industry can at times be parasitic, self-serving, and definitely has vibes of Ponzi or pyramid schemes, and the worst excesses are hidden from view if you are not in the industry. Good fortune.