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Comment by alrs | Hacker News Reader

A "microservice" solves scaling issues for huge companies. If you have 60 microservices, you should probably have 600 engineers (10 per) to deal with them. If you're completely underwater and have 10 services per engineer, you're 100% absolutely play-acting "web-scale" for an audience of really dumb managers/investors.

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With proper devops tooling and a half decent design, even a junior engineer can manage several microservices without issues. Since microservices are about scaling people as much as they are about scaling tech, 10 people in one service is a lot to me in that world.

The best company I worked at had about 5-10 deployable per engineers on average and it worked really well. They were small, deployed almost instantly, dependencies were straightforward, etc.

Monoliths work fine too, it's just different tradeoffs.

I ended up getting into a few arguments at work with the over excited engineer in my last place. He wanted microservices. I said it was just going to add complexity. The app was already a mess, adding network calls rather than function calls wasn't going to help. We had a small teas - 3 backend devs, one of them doing mostly devops and two frontend.

It's not clear to me what you mean by dealing here. Do you mean developing? If so, I completely agree. If you mean deployments, a small number of engineers can manage hundreds of them easily.

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