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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

The problem with flexibility is that while it may take you one or two steps away from a corner, you'll likely find yourself in a corner soon enough anyway. It's like buying a larger hard drive, thinking you'll never use all the space.

The only real solution, that most managers don't get, is to know all requirements upfront.

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In my world a company probes the market continuously to see what the market wants. The business analysts are getting a stream of requirements and then design new features. Then devs implement those features. Development stops when market growth slows down or when the investors cash in.

The only way to predict what all requirement will be in a product lifetime would be to invent a time machine. This is not what I call "a real solution".

The only real solution is to communicate a lot with the business analyst and make informed decisions on flexibility vs simplicity.

And yet it is impossible to know all the requirements upfront which is why micro services and atomic functions are so popular. It seemingly reduces the complexity of redoing everything.

Not sure I think that's a big argument for microservices/atomic functions but rather just for decoupling things in general.

For me, the appeal of microservices is the organizational challenges it solves (allowing teams to move and deploy at their own pace).

My current codebase is a monolith because we're a tiny team, but the different parts are not tightly coupled more than they need to be and it doesn't feel slow to change things.

Yea you are absolutely right. While microservices do alleviate the aforementioned problems, sensible software design will as well.

The hard drive analogy is appropriate; the solution is to buy more/bigger hard drives when you need them. You can’t foresee all requirements, “the map is not the territory”, etc.

Similarly, you build a system with the best information available, and be prepared to change it when the information changes.

One of the requirements is that requirements will change.

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