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Comment by sam_lowry_ | Hacker News Reader

I had a really bad experience in an organisation possessed by a platform team. A small number of individuals were rolling change after change that impacted hundreds of engineers, halving their productivity and halting all development to a grind once a month.

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You know how we have that "libraries are better than frameworks" discussion once a month? It sounds like your platform team was a framework.

Ideally, a platform team should give you reliable, self-service components to build upon, like databases, caches, rate-limiters, api-gateways, etc.

If they're framework-ish, they're mandating you build your app in exactly their preferred way in order to receive the benefits.

ideally 99% of all companies shouldn't even have a platform team, but buy a platform from professionals.

99% of companies should have a platform team, whose role is to make services from AWS/Google/Azure available internally and easy to use.

Yes, or that.

This is a typical challenge for platform teams. Because they are responsible for the underlying foundation on which applications are build, a mistake can easily impact all those applications.

An important realization in my opinion is that a platform team is just another development team. They should consider their platform as a product and the developers as their customers. To minimize any downtime they should use the typical mechanisms that developers are also using: automated tests, pair programming, rolling out changes to test environments first, etc.

I'm sorry to hear that as someone who has done this role in the past I can tell you that it's the opposite of what a platform team should be doing.

When done right a platform team should basically not be noticed except that the tooling, developer experience and overall reliability of a system goes up.

«When done right a platform team should basically not be noticed except that the tooling, developer experience and overall reliability of a system goes up.»

In memories!

Did the platform team use their own platform? I have a theory that that's the right way to set up incentives, but I'm curious whether it works in practice.

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