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Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

> In practice microservices can be just as tough to wrangle as monoliths.

What's worse: Premature scalability.

I joined one project that failed because the developers spent so much time on scalability, without realizing that some basic optimization of their ORM would be enough for a single instance to scale to handle any predictable load.

Now I'm wrangling a product that has premature scalability. It was designed with a lot of loosely coupled services and high degrees of flexibility, but it's impossible to understand and maintain with a small team. A lot of "cleanup" often results in merging modules or cutting out abstraction.

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The company I'm at is a well funded startup that doesn't receive a humongous traffic at all. Yet, the so-called engineers in the early days ended up deciding to split every little functionality into a microservice.

Now we have 20+ microservices that are setup together in a fucked up way. Today, every engineer out of our 150+ engineering team struggles with implementing and getting trivial stuff over the finish line.

Many tasks require making code changes in multiple codebases and there are way too many moving parts. The knowledge overhead required to setup and test shit locally is too high as well. And the documentation gets so obsolete so quickly and people spend an obscene amount of time reaching out to other teams and running in circles to get unblocked on things. Our productivity would literally 5x if we just had 3 or 4 services overall. Even 1 giant service with clear abstraction between teams would have worked well, actually.

Yet, for the flashiness and to keep sounding cool, the folks at our company still keep living with the pain. As an IC, I just fucking do my work 5 hours each day and just keep reminding myself to ignore whatever horrors I keep seeing. Seems to keep going well.

IMO: Either advocate to merge services, or find a new job.

As professionals, part of our job is to advocate for the right solution. Often there is a leader who is emotional about their chosen framework / pattern / architecture / library. It's merely a matter of speaking truth to the right power, and then getting enough consensus to push on the leader to see the error in their ways (or to get the other leaders to push the bad leader out.)

In your job, what you really need to do is point out to non-technical leaders that development of new features is too slow, given the current team size. Don't get too technical with them, but try to find high-level analogies. You can also work on your more direct leadership, but that requires feeling out their motivations.

Thank you for the note. I've actually tried many times to bring up the barriers that are major problems in our company. But everything seems to be subject to a lot of politics. No one seems to be willing to listen, and at one point it just started affecting my morale and peace of mind. My personal situation is currently so that I am unable to switch jobs though. I am willing to take a break and find something new later next year

I’ve started taking 5 layers out of a Rails app, back to MVC. It’s so much faster now I actually feel bad, and I’m not the one that built the app in the first place. The premise during its construction was that it would scale to millions of active users. It…is not doing that in the wild…

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