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Comment by rmoriz | Hacker News Reader

I've admired Drew and the early Dropbox team for getting things done and shipped even when compiled python GUIs was edgy as the initial Rails version of Twitter was. But they shipped and validated the market. Now adding all those fancy and cool tech mentioned in the blog post will increase the complexity by a lot but it's not clear what are the real benefits. Does a decreased number of machines running really justify the migration and addition of complexity? Maybe they have some new products in the pipeline that built upon the new stack. Or they waste their time. We will see.

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> Does a decreased number of machines running really justify the migration and addition of complexity?

Of course it does. I am not sure why you think it doesn't.

servers are a commodity and cheap compared to runtime complexity

This attitude gives us ever less eficicent software that endlessly gobbles up resources for no good reason.

Yes, but it's a lot of servers.

How many? 5000 servers? As a public company it should not really matter at that size. Developers are way more expensive.

effect of being vc funded. the engineers hired later on, only care about engineering problems also company nametag & money, not user level problems. you would think, dropbox would be concerned with providing best value for the buck but nah. plenty of other examples fb, google - google software quality sucks for a place that employs 100s of engineers.

There are lot of things they do that I'm not happy with, but it is still very valuable for the price point. No where else can you get unlimited storage that is fast for so cheap, and they are the only cloud provider that doesn't charge egress to those services.

With that move it is actually decreasing the complexity and improving manageability and sustainability.

If you change all tires if a running car, you are increasing complexity and risk. The blog post describes the fallacy/anti-pattern of starting from scratch. It's usually a people problem when people don't want to understand the Source of the current state and also don't want to fix it. A green field looks so much nicer than dirty plumbing. But it's wrong.

Another sign of this anti-pattern is the hyper focus on the green field solution and not to think about simpler solutions (better DevOps tooling, hire C++ developers to rewrite slower lua Code etc)

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