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When has a decision that’s bad for the decision maker ever been popular? We see it in the C-suite; we see it with engineers. I think the travesty of so-called
by zmgsabst 3y ago
When has a decision that’s bad for the decision maker ever been popular?
We see it in the C-suite; we see it with engineers.
I think the travesty of so-called “principal engineers” and “engineering leaders” is their adamant refusal to make doing the Right Thing (TM) sexy.
Your employees are monkeys: act like it.
- thimp 3y agoYep. Microservices! AWS! Everything Gartner and Thoughtworks says! It'll look good on my resume... ..several years later.. Escalating cloud costs, high staffing cost, staff turnover, heavily reduced margins, decreased productivity, burnout, clients unsatisfied, C-suite paving over this by hiring more marketers...
- CuriouslyC 3y agoI wonder how many early stage businesses went tits up because they drank the microservice kool-aid and burned valuable engineering cycles that should have been spent on features on docker spaghetti.
- dullcrisp 3y agoAlternatively how many later stage business failed because all their features were in a Rails monolith that no number of engineers could maintain.
- yen223 3y agoI once interviewed at Fast. One of the questions they asked was how to scale up a rate limiter. In my mind I was wondering why you'd ever need to worry about scaling up a rate limiter. The answer apparently was some kind of microservice. The company eventually folded[1]. Turns out the company was burning millions of dollars in hiring + infra, while generating only $600,000 in revenue. [1] https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-scoop-fast https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-scoop-fast
- marcosdumay 3y agoWell, did it look good on the resume?
- thimp 3y agoSomeone had to stay behind and muck out the stables...
- marcosdumay 3y agoYeah, but if that expectation was false, those people were justly punished. And if it was true, the problem is clearly elsewhere.
- spinningslate 3y ago>I think the value of so-called “principal engineers” and “engineering leaders” is their adamant refusal to unconditionally jump on all the latest bandwagons and instead make judicious selections of technology appropriate to the problem at hand. FTFY.