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> complexity makes a ton of money. Not for you, of course. Don’t be silly. It makes money for the cloud vendors, the evangelists, the influencers, and the whole
by WJW 3y ago
> complexity makes a ton of money. Not for you, of course. Don’t be silly. It makes money for the cloud vendors, the evangelists, the influencers, and the whole industry that has spun up around these things.
I don't like how this paints devs as blind followers without any opinion or agenda of their own. From my perspective many devs at big and mid-sized companies have a very clear financial incentive to adopt the latest trends.
The way an IC increases their income is usually either by being promoted or by job-hopping to another job with better pay. Getting promoted past a certain point is all about impressing your boss (or promotion committee in certain companies) and "developed a new architecture based on latest insights" is just inherently more impressive than "kept the decade old monolith online for another year". Similarly for job-hopping, hiring managers empirically seem more interested in people with modern tech stacks on their CV than in people who seemingly haven't learned anything in the last 15 years. Thus, devs have a strong incentive to learn and adopt new tech stacks and doing so during work time is clearly the most efficient way to do that.
The jumps in pay between various levels (junior/senior/lead/principal/etc) can be incredibly significant. It would be silly to expect software developers (who are typically intelligent and highly analytical) not to realize that the incentives are very clearly stacked towards following the latest trends. Now I do think that this is a very suboptimal outcome for the company, but if they since they are the ones setting the incentive structure in the first place it is difficult to feel too sorry for them.
- candiodari 3y agoThis doesn't even just apply to developers. The same is true for managers, all levels of HR, ...
- TexanFeller 3y ago> many devs at big and mid-sized companies have a very clear financial incentive to adopt the latest trends. I used to be more hesitant about whether it was a good idea to start out with microservices, then I started going on interviews. I would paraphrase the phone screens I was given as "Have you accepted microservices as your Lord and savior?". Call after call they wanted me to extoll the virtues of microservices before even considering me for an interview.
- lumost 3y agoI wonder if this incentive is stronger at smaller startups. If I routinely work in small startups which are likely to fail, then spending time in aspects of the stack which are likely to be needed at future startups is a smart use of my time. Micro-services have fairly extreme upfront deployment/automation overhead relative to monoliths. This setup effort is common across many firms adopting microservices.
- TexanFeller 3y agoI've for sure found myself thinking along those lines in the past. It's definitely possible it's a common enough thought to affect culture as you suggest.
- whstl 3y agoInterestingly I had the opposite. The more recent interviews I did asked about the advantages and disadvantages of using monoliths vs microserviced, and how to overcome the common problems. I also had questions asking me how I would write frontend applications with and without central state management, or even for which cases I would start with a reactive frontend framework. In one of them I even had a huge disagreement with the interviewer. He still made a point to say I had passed. I think the main difference in this case was that I was interviewed by seasoned pros. When I had interviews with less experienced developers, the topics were as trivial as possible and just looking for confirmation.
- eecc 3y agoI guess you and the parent are sampling the microserivce hype curve at different points in time.
- datavirtue 3y agoHe didn't touch on the fact that the tech is predetermined by the hype. Most of us just have to work with whatever the CTO likes right now or whatever the team thinks is the "most modern."
- brookst 3y agoI am jealous of your problems. Many of us have to work with the best obsolete tech that is still compatible with even more obsolete tech.
- lasereyes136 3y ago> It would be silly to expect software developers (who are typically intelligent and highly analytical) not to realize that the incentives are very clearly stacked towards following the latest trends. Now I do think that this is a very suboptimal outcome for the company, but if they since they are the ones setting the incentive structure in the first place it is difficult to feel too sorry for them. Incentives matter, if you learn nothing else about economics learn this. People do things that they feel are best for them so companies need to align personal incentives with company outcomes or face sub-optimal solutions for the companies because the employees feel the solutions is optimal for themselves. With an average employee tenure at a company being a few years, how can longer term issues with software ever be a deciding factor for employees.