Comment by matt2000 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by matt2000 | Hacker News Reader

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When I started programming professionally it was the era of "Object Oriented Design" will save us all. I worked on an e-commerce site that had a class hierarchy 18 levels deep just to render a product on a page. No one knew what all those levels were for, but it sure was complicated and slow as hell. The current obsession with microservices feels the same in many ways.

There appear to be exactly two reasons to use microservices:

1. Your company needs APIs to define responsibility over specific functionality. Usually happens when teams get big. 2. You have a set of functions that need specific hardware to scale. GPUs, huge memory, high performance local disk, etc. It might not make sense to scale as a monolith then.

One thing you sure don't get is performance. You're going to take an in-process shared-memory function call and turn it into a serialized network call and it'll be _faster_? That's crazy talk.

So why are we doing it?

1. Because we follow the lead of large tech companies because they have great engineers, but unfortunately they have very different problems then we do. 2. The average number of years of experience in the industry is pretty low. I've seen two of these kinds of cycles now and we just keep making the same mistakes over and over.

Anyway, I'm not sure who I'm writing this comment for, I guess myself! And please don't take this as criticism, I've made these exact mistakes before too. I just wish we as an industry had a deeper understanding of what's been done before and why it didn't work.

A great many of our problems in tech are the result of "...we follow the lead of large tech companies...but unfortunately they have very different problems than we do."

Imagine if we built single-family houses based on what made sense for skyscrapers. Or if we built subcompact cars based on a shrunk-down version of semi-tractor trailers. They would not be efficient, or even effective.

But, if your aspiration is to get a job at a skyscraper-builder, then it MIGHT be what makes sense to do. "Have you used appropriate-only-for-largest-websites technology X?" "Why yes I have." The same incentives probably apply to the tech management, btw. We have an incentives problem.

Its not about the age of the engineers but maturity. Some just dont care about quality of their work because they get paid either way. Look at Silicon Valley, "ageism" is real there. They need young devs with ideas and huge skill to bring them to life, to stay ahead of the competition. Most companies dont understand that and blindly try to copy that often because their management is not competent enough.

Reasons for current situation are plenty. World and ppl are complicated.

> They need young devs with ideas and huge skill to bring them to life

More likely young devs with naivety and thus motivation.

> young devs with ideas and huge skill

LOL :D You mean cheap devs who will work for half the price and will never raise their concerns and will gladly accept the stupidest and most menial tasks.

> One thing you sure don't get is performance.

You can optimise per use case. In the monolith everything has to work for every use case. In a service you might not care to write, you might not care if your writes are super async. This means you can start to take liberties with the back-end (e.g. denormalising where necessary) and you have room to breathe.

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