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Comment by MrDarcy | Hacker News Reader

Reading it with hindsight, their problems have less to do with the technical trade off of micro or monolith services and much more to do with the quality and organizational structure of their engineering department. The decisions and reasons given shine a light on the quality. The repository and test layout shine a light on the structure.

Given the quality and the structure neither approach really matters much. The root problems are elsewhere.

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My observation is that many teams lack strong "technical discipline"; someone that says "no, don't do that", makes the case, and takes a stand. It's easy to let the complexity genie out of the bottle if the team doesn't have someone like this with enough clout/authority to actually make the team pause.

I 100% agree with you but also sad fact is that it’s easy to understand why people don’t want to take this role. You can make enemies easily, you need to deliver “bad news” and convince people to put more effort or prove that effort they did was not enough. Why bother when you probably won’t be the one that have to clean it up

    > You can make enemies easily...

Short term, definitely. In the long tail? If you are right more than you are wrong, then that manifests as respect.

Ha! I wish I worked at the places you have worked!

I think the problem is that this microservices vs monolith decision is a really hard one to convince people of. I made a passionate case for ECS instead of lambda for a long time, but only after the rest of the team and leadership see the problems the popular strategy generates do we get something approaching uptake (and the balance has already shifted to kubernetes instead, which is at least better)

    > I made a passionate case...

My experience is that it is less about passion and more about reason.

There's a lot of good research and writing on this topic. This paper, in particular has been really helpful for my cause: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3593856.3595909

It has a lot going for it: 1) it's from Google, 2) it's easy to read and digest, 3) it makes a really clear case for monoliths.

>the quality and organizational structure of their engineering department

You're not kidding. I had to work with twilio on a project and it was awful. Any time there was an issue with the API, they'd never delve into why that issue had happened. They'd simply fix the data in their database and close the ticket. We'd have the same issue over and over and over again and they'd never make any effort to fix the cause of the problems.

This is probably the first time I’ve seen a human use the word “delve”.

It immediately triggered my - is this AI?

People from different countries especially where English is not their first language often have more esoteric words in their vocabulary.

Maybe you just don't read many books written after the year 2000? It was a pretty common word even before ChatGPT: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=delve&year_sta...

But perhaps the most famous source is Tolkien: "The Dwarves tell no tale; but even as mithril was the foundation of their wealth, so also it was their destruction: they delved too greedily and too deep, and disturbed that from which they fled, Durin's Bane."

As a non-native speaker, I read a lot of fantasy and science fiction books in English. I use "delve" regularly (I wouldn't say "frequently" though). Not sure if it's Terry Pratchett's Discworld influence, but plenty of archaic sounding words there.

I did not even know it was considered uncommon and archaic, tbh.

I guess there may be regional differences but delve is a commonly used word for native speakers.

Conway's Law shines again!

It's amazing how much explanatory power it has, to the point that I can predict at least some traits about a company's codebase during an interview process, without directly asking them about it.

In this case, the more applicable are:

1. "Peter principle": "people in a hierarchy and organizations tend to rise to 'a level of respective incompetence' "

2. "Parkinson's law": "Work expands to fill the available time".

So people are filling all the available the time and working tirelessly to reach their personal and organizational levels of incompetency; working hard without stopping to think if what they are doing should be done at all. And nobody is stopping them, nobody asks why (with the real analysis of positives, negatives, risks).

Incompetent + driven is the worst combination there can be.

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