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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

Out of interest how do you get the authority to make those decisions and have the existing developers continue working productively after this?

To me it seems like microservices (or cloud, or whatever) is often overused for career/buzzword reasons. The engineers pushing for it aren't asking for your advice, they want to build an engineering playground - denying them the opportunity is unlikely to suddenly make them productive at driving the business forward with a simple stack when their original idea was to play with shiny tech instead.

The only way I see out of this is to have management buy-in to get the microservices and their developers out the door, replaced by more competent people.

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> their original idea was to play with shiny tech instead

This is a behavior I would say is very hard to manage out of people and should be screened for aggressively in interviews.

This behavior is self-inflicted by a decade of low pay and lack of significant raises to reward seniority.

The most effective way to increase income for a developer is to join a place, rack up as many buzzwords as possible and leave after 2-3 years, using those buzzwords to secure a higher-paying role somewhere else. Rinse and repeat until you get a management position where you can use politics to increase your income instead.

If you want guys that use boring tech to drive the business forward you have to pay them upfront the money they’d otherwise make playing the above game. It still makes sense (an engineering playground is anything but cheap) but good luck getting an employer to pay anything above “market rate”.

The time up to and including Covid saw massive developer salary increases. They've dropped (and lots have been laid off) post-Covid, but the last ten years cannot be described as stagnation.

The salaries may be high in absolute terms, but they’re still low in relative terms - compared to what jumping ship would give you when you have a resume full of buzzwords.

I wouldnt describe the 2010s as low pay for devs

Indeed Youth is wasted on the youth

> Out of interest how do you... have the existing developers continue working productively after this?

I don't know if you can in general - by happy coincidence the engineer who had made that plan found his way to the door shortly thereafter

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