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Comment by krosaen | Hacker News Reader

This is interesting not only because there was a product decision to sort the seasons of Black Mirror so that S4e1 would show up instead of S1e1 to avoid showing the pig f--er episode in people's home page, but also because the lengths to which the tangled mess of microservices had to be wrangled to make this happen - 4 months of work!

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Having worked at a place that went heavy into microservices, this story was incredibly relatable.

The hard part isn't implementing the change - although having to implement it in n different places doesn't help - the hard part is having to coordinate the change with n different teams to get the change out.

> (...) the hard part is having to coordinate the change with n different teams to get the change out.

I feel this is the reason why microservices end up being attacked by clueless developers, because ultimately they are the scapegoat for organizational issues.

The primary selling point of microservices is that they are a management tool, as an org can use them to build teams with a very specific and clear-cut set of responsibilities. Microservices end up being a realization of Conway's law. Consequently, microservices end up being leveraged in intra-organizational conflicts.

It's not that microservices cause these issues, but that the organizations that run microservices cause these issues. If you have the same team managing multiple microservices, these problems don't happen because they don't have the coordination problems that separate teams endure, specially when managers clash.

I think that’s too strong an overreaction. Conway’s law is powerful but it’s not the only reason why microservices are harder: there are also valid technical concerns inherent to needing to coordinate changes across multiple services which are still a concern even if the same people are running everything. That doesn’t mean they’re not worth using but greater frictional costs needs to be a consciously-accepted trade off.

> Conway’s law is powerful but it’s not the only reason why microservices are harder (...)

It's the reason covered in the video you're commenting on, though. Except that "teams who happen to own microservices experience org coordination issues" is spun as "microservices owned by teams cause organizational issues".

From their inception, microservices were always a management tool, which happens to have operational and technical benefits and tradeoffs. If a project goes through challenges because they can't get all teams on the same page, that is not a technical problem.

Netflix wasted so much potential thinking they are a tech company instead of thinking they are a media company. That's why unfortunately they will slowly fade away instead of becoming a media powerhouse like Disney.

why can't you do both? Chaos Monkey is valuable

The board he drew was totally unintelligible but also immediately told me that Netflix didn’t or doesn’t know what its actual domains are. Adding functionality like this, even in a microservices world, should have been trivial and obvious, but nobody thought ahead and now they’ve ended up with a spiderweb of tangled services that have unclear responsibilities.

Seems like this was a terrible waste of time for a foolish feature. A major miss for product.

Why not decide if it's generally seasons or episodes that need to be sorted above and introduce a simple tag to accomplish.

IE: Black Mirror S4 is given a promo/priority flag and any season marked promo is sorted to the top.

It probably would have been cheaper to just delete the episode than sink 4 months worth of additional engineering salary into an episode that probably generates no interest in the series.

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