I agree. I’m afraid I’m one of those 00s developers and can relate. Back then many startups were being launched on super simple stacks.
With all of that complexity/word salad from TFA, where’s the value delivered? Presumably there’s a product somewhere under all that infrastructure, but damn, what’s left to spend on it after all the infrastructure variable costs?
I get it’s a list of preferences, but still once you’ve got your selection that’s still a ton of crap to pay for and deal with.
Do we ever seek simplicity in software engineering products?
I think that far too many companies get sold on the vision of "it just works, you don't need to hire ops people to run the tools you need for your business". And that is true! And while you're starting, it may be that you can't afford to hire an ops guy and can't take the time to do it yourself. But it doesn't take that much scale before you get to the point it would be cheaper to just manage your own tools.
Cloud and SaaS tools are very seductive, but I think they're ultimately a trap. Keep your tools simple and just run them yourselves, it's not that hard.
Look, the thing is - most of infra decisions are made by devops/devs that have a vested interest in this.
Either because they only know how to manage AWS instances (it was the hotness and thats what all the blogs and YT videos were about) and are now terrified from losing their jobs if the companies switch stacks. Or because they needed to put the new thing on their CV so they remain employable. Also maybe because they had to get that promotion and bonus for doing hard things and migrating things. Or because they were pressured into by bean counters which were pressured by the geniuses of Wall Street to move capex to opex.
In any case, this isn't by necessity these days. This is because, for a massive amount of engineers, that's the only way they know how to do things and after the gold rush of high pay, there's not many engineers around that are in it to learn or do things better. It's for the paycheck.
It is what it is. The actual reality of engineering the products well doesn't come close to the work being done by the people carrying that fancy superstar engineer title.
You know the old adage "fast, cheap, good: pick two"? With startups, you're forced to pick fast. You're still probably not gonna make it, but if you don't build fast, you definitely won't.
For simplicity, software must be well built. Unfortunately, the software development practice is perpetually underskilled so we release buggy crap which we compensate for in infrastructure.
> Do we ever seek simplicity in software engineering products?
Doubtfully. Simplicity of work breakdown structure - maybe. Legibility for management layers, possibly. Structural integrity of your CYA armor? 100%.
The half-life of a software project is what now, a few years at most these days? Months, in webdev? Why build something that is robust, durable, efficient, make all the correct engineering choices, where you can instead race ahead with a series of "nobody ever got fired for using ${current hot cloud thing}" choices, not worrying at all about rapidly expanding pile of tech and organizational debt? If you push the repayment time far back enough, your project will likely be dead by then anyway (win), or acquired by a greater fool (BIG WIN) - either way, you're not cleaning up anything.
Nobody wants to stay attached to a project these days anyway.
With all of that complexity/word salad from TFA, where’s the value delivered? Presumably there’s a product somewhere under all that infrastructure, but damn, what’s left to spend on it after all the infrastructure variable costs?
I get it’s a list of preferences, but still once you’ve got your selection that’s still a ton of crap to pay for and deal with.
Do we ever seek simplicity in software engineering products?