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>>> Wouldn’t folks feel better making smart, reasonable, and incremental improvements? Consider cases like introducing Kotlin to gradually level-up a Java shop.
by _ZeD_ 2y ago
>>> Wouldn’t folks feel better making smart, reasonable, and incremental improvements? Consider cases like introducing Kotlin to gradually level-up a Java shop.
while I could agree on the "principles", specifically for this example I still have scars.
Too much costs, no much gain, and you end up with a single project (the first and last one) that no one want to touch and that will be the first to be "engineered back" to java - years later and with a lot of loss
- adamc 2y agoI have seen this pattern many times. In some cases, we still have the "innovative" project, but it's now well behind the times, because no one wants to touch all the "innovative" (but poorly understood) code. There is more than one cause, but an "innovative" project in 2010 might now just look like a trap with ancient technology. They often do not age well. So, if you aren't prepared to fail fast and rewrite them a few years later -- and many orgs are not -- this can be a problematic path. "Mainstream" solutions may also be traps, but they are traps you can hire people to maintain or upgrade. I think you can survive adopting, say, an unpopular language if you are willing to commit and hire-to-train for it, but it takes some focus and commitment, which can be difficult to get executive backing for in many shops. But one-off experiments with the tech stack can be risky unless you can really afford to rewrite failures promptly. FANGs can do this, of course, as can many Fortune 500 companies, but the majority of IT shops probably cannot.