Comment by anal_reactor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anal_reactor | Hacker News Reader

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I'm stunned to realize that most developers just blindly follow whatever are the newest hottest "good practices" and completely ignore the actual goals that code should try to achieve. Literally yesterday I had an argument with a coworker because he wouldn't buy the argument "High-availability costs us $2000 per year extra, downtime costs us $100 per day, so if the database breaks once per year, there's no point having high-availability". Some time ago someone important from upper management announced that we need to pump out features faster to stay afloat as a business, even if they're a bit broken, and two hours later the most senior programmer in my team introduced us to new bureaucracy "because that's the best practice" and he wouldn't understand that what he's doing is directly at odds with the company's goals. Same guy also often accuses me of "not seeing the bigger picture". I gave up trying to reason with coworkers because it's just pain and changes nothing in the long run besides exhausting me.

On the other side of the argument, does $2000 a year seem a lot for high-availability?

Does downtime really cost only $100 per day? How was it calculated? How much does your business make? It would seem it should make more than 365 * $100 = $36,500 to be able to be in a position to hire people in the first place.

Database downtime would potentially:

1) Break trust with customers.

2) Take away focus from your engs for a day or more which is also a cost. If an eng costs $200 per day for example, and you have 4 engs involved with, it's already a cost of $800, not to mention increase of odds of stress and burn out. And in US engs would cost of course much more than that, I was just picking a more favourable sum.

3) If it's a database that breaks, it's likely to cause further damages due to issues with data which might take indefinite time to fix.

Overall in most businesses it would seem a no brainer to pay $2000 a year to have high availability and avoid any odds of a database breaking. It's very little compared to what you pay your engineers.

The whole thing is a side project with 5 customers total. If it dies it'll take a while before anyone notices.

It's a side project but you are calling them coworkers and a company with company's goals?

> I gave up trying to reason with coworkers because it's just pain and changes nothing in the long run besides exhausting me.

What are you even supposed to do in such situations?

It might be not possible to make them see things your way or vice versa.

You probably don’t want to get the person fired and going to look for a new place of employment just because of one or two difficult people doesn’t seem all that nice either.

You can get the management on your side (sometimes), but even then that won’t really change anything about similar future situations.

To me, it seems like there aren’t that many options, whenever it’s anything more abstract than being able to point to a sheet of test results and say “A is better than B, we are doing A”.

I’ve had fundamental disagreements with other people as well, nowadays I don’t really try to convince them of anything and try to limit how deep those discussions get because often they’re quite pointless, whenever they’re not purely data based. That doesn’t actually fix anything and the codebases do get less pleasant to work with at times for someone like me.

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