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(God, how I love confirmation bias when it's my own bias.) I've been saying this for years, the microservices insanity it's just an excuse for mediocre enginee

by mojuba 3y ago

(God, how I love confirmation bias when it's my own bias.) I've been saying this for years, the microservices insanity it's just an excuse for mediocre engineers to be in demand. It is fueled by mediocrity but it is also what keeps so many tech companies going. There are simply not enough competent engineers who master UNIX and who can build beautiful minimalist systems like StackOverflow's or a bunch of others' mentioned in this article. Therefore microservices as a smoke screen for mediocrity is here to stay, it's not going away any time soon, especially considering that cloud providers like AWS promote themselves via all possible channels and encourage the decision makers to take that route anyway.

Tade0 3y ago
> I've been saying this for years, the microservices insanity it's just an excuse for mediocre engineers to be in demand. Or just inexperienced ones who want to pad their CVs. I think we failed to educate the current generation on what's important in this job.
dan_mctree 3y ago
I don't know why but no one hires or listens to the architect who recommends sticking to safe monolithic-esque systems. If you're not talking cloud and microservices and the newest unproven frameworks, you're an old fogey who needs to get with the times. Even though those types of systems are rarely the most efficient, powerful or safe systems I work for a company that builds software to be used internally by other business. We have like 200 people tops using it simultaneously with no usage spikes, a perfect environment for regular web servers as we'll never have unexpected scaling issues, yet everyone is dying to go to the cloud. Why? I think it's just because our management, programmers and even customers are convinced by cloud provider marketing that the cloud is cool
- misja111 3y ago
  Architects that propose pragmatic and boring solutions are usually not hired. It's the emperor's new clothes, companies like the idea of an architect who comes with some revolutionary new concept that will lead to a breakthrough that finally will make everybody rich. If they don't understand the architect's idea, so much the better because then it must be really state of the art.
PartiallyTyped 3y ago
Other senior in my team and I agree with you.. We are wasting 20+ people's time because we were forced to rush into something that resulted in 5-6 different microservices where a monolith written by 6 competent engineers over 6 months would have sufficed. What you describe regarding microservices and AWS is also a thing internally.............
danjac 3y ago
While there are definitely developers who are enthusiastic about microservices for all the wrong reasons (e.g. it looks good on the resume) I think it's more about how companies deal with complexity. Companies don't just ship their org chart, they ship all their dysfunction and historical baggage. A beautiful, well-architected platform from 5 years ago, with an efficient, thought-out data model and API and well-written and tested code, might be a total mess after 5 years of constant pivots from the CEO, last minute customer requests the sales team have pushed through, product managers doing their hydrant-meets-dog act of adding features nobody needed or asked for, and never enough people and time to do as good a job as the developers would like. One day you wake up with a big pile of tech debt and fixing bugs and adding features takes way longer than it should, and microservices are that siren call that promises a solution that doesn't involve burning the whole thing to the ground and starting over.
danmaz74 3y ago
In my experience, a mediocre engineer can build a decent monolith, especially if they're using an opinionated framework (like Ruby on Rails). On the other hand, building microservices is much more complex as there are more moving parts and more failure modes, so the mediocre engineer - and even many non mediocre ones - is much more likely to create problems.
tonyedgecombe 3y ago
>There are simply not enough competent engineers who master UNIX and who can build beautiful minimalist systems like StackOverflow's StackOverflow is built on Windows not UNIX. I know I am nitpicking here but there is a larger point. The technology choice is rarely the bottleneck.

by mojuba 3y ago

Tade0 3y ago

> I've been saying this for years, the microservices insanity it's just an excuse for mediocre engineers to be in demand. Or just inexperienced ones who want to pad their CVs. I think we failed to educate the current generation on what's important in this job.

dan_mctree 3y ago

I don't know why but no one hires or listens to the architect who recommends sticking to safe monolithic-esque systems. If you're not talking cloud and microservices and the newest unproven frameworks, you're an old fogey who needs to get with the times. Even though those types of systems are rarely the most efficient, powerful or safe systems I work for a company that builds software to be used internally by other business. We have like 200 people tops using it simultaneously with no usage spikes, a perfect environment for regular web servers as we'll never have unexpected scaling issues, yet everyone is dying to go to the cloud. Why? I think it's just because our management, programmers and even customers are convinced by cloud provider marketing that the cloud is cool

misja111 3y ago
Architects that propose pragmatic and boring solutions are usually not hired. It's the emperor's new clothes, companies like the idea of an architect who comes with some revolutionary new concept that will lead to a breakthrough that finally will make everybody rich. If they don't understand the architect's idea, so much the better because then it must be really state of the art.

PartiallyTyped 3y ago

Other senior in my team and I agree with you.. We are wasting 20+ people's time because we were forced to rush into something that resulted in 5-6 different microservices where a monolith written by 6 competent engineers over 6 months would have sufficed. What you describe regarding microservices and AWS is also a thing internally.............

danjac 3y ago

While there are definitely developers who are enthusiastic about microservices for all the wrong reasons (e.g. it looks good on the resume) I think it's more about how companies deal with complexity. Companies don't just ship their org chart, they ship all their dysfunction and historical baggage. A beautiful, well-architected platform from 5 years ago, with an efficient, thought-out data model and API and well-written and tested code, might be a total mess after 5 years of constant pivots from the CEO, last minute customer requests the sales team have pushed through, product managers doing their hydrant-meets-dog act of adding features nobody needed or asked for, and never enough people and time to do as good a job as the developers would like. One day you wake up with a big pile of tech debt and fixing bugs and adding features takes way longer than it should, and microservices are that siren call that promises a solution that doesn't involve burning the whole thing to the ground and starting over.

danmaz74 3y ago

In my experience, a mediocre engineer can build a decent monolith, especially if they're using an opinionated framework (like Ruby on Rails). On the other hand, building microservices is much more complex as there are more moving parts and more failure modes, so the mediocre engineer - and even many non mediocre ones - is much more likely to create problems.

tonyedgecombe 3y ago

>There are simply not enough competent engineers who master UNIX and who can build beautiful minimalist systems like StackOverflow's StackOverflow is built on Windows not UNIX. I know I am nitpicking here but there is a larger point. The technology choice is rarely the bottleneck.