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Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

Resume driven development is the way to go. Fulfilling the business case with minimal effort is good for the business but really bad for the engineer. You need microservices, NodeJS, react, cloud and whatever to stay employable. Even your own company won't be grateful for delivering a simple and robust solution.

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Boy do I disagree with just about everything here. You need to keep your skills up to date, this is correct. Absolutely.

I think it's a much more important skill to acknowledge that you don't need things like microservices, node, and react when you can deliver a simple, robust solution without any of that stuff.

The problem is when you look for the next job or even when the next project starts at your company you won't get credit for delivering a pragmatic solution. They often will bring in new people who have the cool stuff on their resume.

This is the difference between how it should be, and how it is. When you solve something simply and pragmatically it won't impress the non-technical or semi-technical manager. They also want to see microservices, bells and whistles.

Believe it or not for many managers "I refactored something and fixed the problem in an hour" isn't very desirable. When you go to your next interviewer they won't be impressed either, though they absolutely should be.

who is the gatekeeper in the company that is going to say "we don't need this"? Everybody has a vested interest in resume driven development, and these days "netflix/google/amazon do it, so we should too" seems to be like the good old "nobody got fired for buying IBM" (whether or not doing what a company at 100x your scale does makes sense)

I agree with you that it should be that way, but in my experience it isn't. Jumping on the latest shiny stuff is a better strategy for most devs.

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