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Congratulations, this is where a pattern matching system with years of experience having to deal with this industry steps in. Make the intuitive jumps yourself

Congratulations, this is where a pattern matching system with years of experience having to deal with this industry steps in. Make the intuitive jumps yourself.

throwaway11460 2y ago
From my years of experience with the industry, ideas like microservices were used way before zero interest rates, and will continue to be used, because they solve actual real problems many people have. Not saying it's always the best approach - as I mentioned, where I worked it was always under heavy scrutiny and chosen only if it was the best approach, which wasn't always.
- financltravsty 2y ago
  Yes, but it is now impossible to separate them from the hype (same as functional programming languages, cloud providers, etc.). They will continue to be used, but their proliferation into contexts where they are not the best tool (MongoDB as a shining example) was very much a part of the ZIRP environment (the underlying reasons are numerous).
- rvz 2y ago
  > From my years of experience with the industry, ideas like microservices were used way before zero interest rates, and will continue to be used, because they solve actual real problems many people have. It is one of the many ways for a VC funded company to quickly run out of money. Given that companies such as Uber and Monzo proudly report that they have thousands upon thousands of micro-services with other startups copying that due to the micro-services hype, I can only see that as a way to introduce more problems such as more operational costs and significant complexity to engineers. Microservices was indeed a ZIRP idea taken to the extreme in many startups believing they could scale like Google, except that they could not afford to and most of them either bankrupted themselves or are still losing hundreds of thousands a month on this idea and are cutting down on the micro-services fad to save money.
  - throwaway11460 2y ago
    Hmm... I know we're on a startup site, but that's really only a very small part of the business world. Microservice architecture/SOA as we used to call it is successfuly employed at many more traditional small, middle and large enterprises and it has nothing to do with interest rates at these places.
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Hmm how many years are you going back? ZIRP in the USA began around 2008 and "microservices" as a word didn't really start being used until several years after that: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=microservices&year_start=2000&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=microservices&... We can debate what DHH really means when he says microservices. Distributed systems are obviously a lot older than the term microservices. But I think he's talking about systems that compromise many services that don't obviously map to hardware or organizational boundaries, which was the original reason you'd split a program up across multiple independent servers. I have to admit I don't recall encountering that trend before 2011 or so. If you take an app written in the 2000-2010 era e.g. Jira, they're all going to be either monoliths or apps loaded into Java app servers.
  - throwaway11460 2y ago
    It was called service oriented architecture before microservices, and the concept itself is way older in the mainframe world; not sure if it actually had a name because it was simply the way it needs to be done. Unix is basically microservices - and back in the 80s and early 90s even network services were built with the Unix philosophy, remember CGI? The Microsoft/Windows world was no stranger to it too - Corba (1991), D-COM (1996), SOAP (1998), WCF (2006) and now it's REST. Software systems on mainframes were comparable to what we call serverless today - having more external interfaces (like HTTP servers) running on a computer would waste resources, there was one common external interface that invoked code on request based on configuration, and that code delegated heavily to specialized systems - since there wasn't even enough program memory and loading from disk was slow. Having multiple layers of backend systems was normal. Queues and batch job processing was usual too, and frontend systems usually provided precalculated data only, transactions were processed through the night. Monoliths were actually the "cool new thing" started in late 90s and perpetuated by Java, PHP, Python and Ruby devs later on, they claimed it's easier to develop and deploy. Many people saw it as a conflict between corporate and startup software development practices - the boring engineers in suits always talking about service specifications and requirements for months VS the cool hackers that don't care and develop directly on prod server FTP to deliver a feature over the weekend. JIRA was one of these cool hacker startups. I don't think the hackers were completely wrong and delivering quickly has value, but it's much more nuanced than "ZIRP bad because ZIRP made microservices", see also my other comment there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40334281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40334281
syndicatedjelly 2y ago
You seem knowledgable, it’s a shame you couldn’t justify your argument with something better than “Trust me, I’m experienced and have seen things.” What have you experienced that led to your conclusion that ZIRP -> bad decisions?
- financltravsty 2y ago
  A very fuzzy pattern that has repeated itself in numerous industries: the easier money is to get/have, the less robust and exacting one has to be with the processes of attaining and maintaining it. A clear example is with any of the numerous "high profile" VC-funded ventures. You can spend a lot of time and money over-engineering things, because you are not (and neither your boss or his boss and so on) involved in a feedback loop that is tightly coupled with the making of "real" money. Your actions have no real consequences on the business unit as a whole, and no one is holding you to it. What tends to happen is it gets filled with "dreamers" and "schemers." Both who, rather than contributing to the health of the business, erode it for their own ends. Without there being a "tether to reality" so-to-speak, their actions no longer have to face reality a la profitability. Generally, the consequences of this are many and I do not wish to enumerate on them (but I will drop these without going into any painstaking depth: organizations that are built primarily around key players' career interests, products made to that end, and even day-to-day choices that in the grand scheme of things mean nothing, but something as simple as choosing Redis as a primary relational database, all reverberate). This is just my very sloppy attempt at putting intuition into words, but this is a pattern of varying magnitude that always emerges whenever money is detached from merit. This happens in all sorts of personal and business contexts. Whenever the fruits of whatever labor are detached from its process, the less likely the processes used to attain and maintain it are "sound," sustainable, and so on. Think of a lottery winner: he has just received a large sum of liquid cash, but he most likely neither has the ability to hold onto it or the know-how to grow it (much less make the same amount again). His decision-making and skillset is utterly detached from his gains. That sort of thing is only honed through a tight feedback loop. The same can be seen with engineers who have only resided in corporate behemoths: drop them into a startup and they will likely flounder. There is a much larger discussion to be had about human incentives, but I hope that you are able to make the intuitive jump yourself.

Congratulations, this is where a pattern matching system with years of experience having to deal with this industry steps in. Make the intuitive jumps yourself.

throwaway11460 2y ago

From my years of experience with the industry, ideas like microservices were used way before zero interest rates, and will continue to be used, because they solve actual real problems many people have. Not saying it's always the best approach - as I mentioned, where I worked it was always under heavy scrutiny and chosen only if it was the best approach, which wasn't always.

financltravsty 2y ago
Yes, but it is now impossible to separate them from the hype (same as functional programming languages, cloud providers, etc.). They will continue to be used, but their proliferation into contexts where they are not the best tool (MongoDB as a shining example) was very much a part of the ZIRP environment (the underlying reasons are numerous).
rvz 2y ago
> From my years of experience with the industry, ideas like microservices were used way before zero interest rates, and will continue to be used, because they solve actual real problems many people have. It is one of the many ways for a VC funded company to quickly run out of money. Given that companies such as Uber and Monzo proudly report that they have thousands upon thousands of micro-services with other startups copying that due to the micro-services hype, I can only see that as a way to introduce more problems such as more operational costs and significant complexity to engineers. Microservices was indeed a ZIRP idea taken to the extreme in many startups believing they could scale like Google, except that they could not afford to and most of them either bankrupted themselves or are still losing hundreds of thousands a month on this idea and are cutting down on the micro-services fad to save money.
- throwaway11460 2y ago
  Hmm... I know we're on a startup site, but that's really only a very small part of the business world. Microservice architecture/SOA as we used to call it is successfuly employed at many more traditional small, middle and large enterprises and it has nothing to do with interest rates at these places.
mike_hearn 2y ago
Hmm how many years are you going back? ZIRP in the USA began around 2008 and "microservices" as a word didn't really start being used until several years after that: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=microservices&year_start=2000&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=microservices&... We can debate what DHH really means when he says microservices. Distributed systems are obviously a lot older than the term microservices. But I think he's talking about systems that compromise many services that don't obviously map to hardware or organizational boundaries, which was the original reason you'd split a program up across multiple independent servers. I have to admit I don't recall encountering that trend before 2011 or so. If you take an app written in the 2000-2010 era e.g. Jira, they're all going to be either monoliths or apps loaded into Java app servers.
- throwaway11460 2y ago
  It was called service oriented architecture before microservices, and the concept itself is way older in the mainframe world; not sure if it actually had a name because it was simply the way it needs to be done. Unix is basically microservices - and back in the 80s and early 90s even network services were built with the Unix philosophy, remember CGI? The Microsoft/Windows world was no stranger to it too - Corba (1991), D-COM (1996), SOAP (1998), WCF (2006) and now it's REST. Software systems on mainframes were comparable to what we call serverless today - having more external interfaces (like HTTP servers) running on a computer would waste resources, there was one common external interface that invoked code on request based on configuration, and that code delegated heavily to specialized systems - since there wasn't even enough program memory and loading from disk was slow. Having multiple layers of backend systems was normal. Queues and batch job processing was usual too, and frontend systems usually provided precalculated data only, transactions were processed through the night. Monoliths were actually the "cool new thing" started in late 90s and perpetuated by Java, PHP, Python and Ruby devs later on, they claimed it's easier to develop and deploy. Many people saw it as a conflict between corporate and startup software development practices - the boring engineers in suits always talking about service specifications and requirements for months VS the cool hackers that don't care and develop directly on prod server FTP to deliver a feature over the weekend. JIRA was one of these cool hacker startups. I don't think the hackers were completely wrong and delivering quickly has value, but it's much more nuanced than "ZIRP bad because ZIRP made microservices", see also my other comment there: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40334281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40334281

syndicatedjelly 2y ago

You seem knowledgable, it’s a shame you couldn’t justify your argument with something better than “Trust me, I’m experienced and have seen things.” What have you experienced that led to your conclusion that ZIRP -> bad decisions?

financltravsty 2y ago
A very fuzzy pattern that has repeated itself in numerous industries: the easier money is to get/have, the less robust and exacting one has to be with the processes of attaining and maintaining it. A clear example is with any of the numerous "high profile" VC-funded ventures. You can spend a lot of time and money over-engineering things, because you are not (and neither your boss or his boss and so on) involved in a feedback loop that is tightly coupled with the making of "real" money. Your actions have no real consequences on the business unit as a whole, and no one is holding you to it. What tends to happen is it gets filled with "dreamers" and "schemers." Both who, rather than contributing to the health of the business, erode it for their own ends. Without there being a "tether to reality" so-to-speak, their actions no longer have to face reality a la profitability. Generally, the consequences of this are many and I do not wish to enumerate on them (but I will drop these without going into any painstaking depth: organizations that are built primarily around key players' career interests, products made to that end, and even day-to-day choices that in the grand scheme of things mean nothing, but something as simple as choosing Redis as a primary relational database, all reverberate). This is just my very sloppy attempt at putting intuition into words, but this is a pattern of varying magnitude that always emerges whenever money is detached from merit. This happens in all sorts of personal and business contexts. Whenever the fruits of whatever labor are detached from its process, the less likely the processes used to attain and maintain it are "sound," sustainable, and so on. Think of a lottery winner: he has just received a large sum of liquid cash, but he most likely neither has the ability to hold onto it or the know-how to grow it (much less make the same amount again). His decision-making and skillset is utterly detached from his gains. That sort of thing is only honed through a tight feedback loop. The same can be seen with engineers who have only resided in corporate behemoths: drop them into a startup and they will likely flounder. There is a much larger discussion to be had about human incentives, but I hope that you are able to make the intuitive jump yourself.