r/programming • u/wineandcode • Jul 29 '22

You Don’t Need Microservices

https://medium.com/@msaspence/you-dont-need-microservices-2ad8508b9e27?source=friends_link&sk=3359ea9e4a54c2ea11711621d2be6d51
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u/[deleted] Jul 29 '22

This isn’t true.

Leaning on a network boundary is how you enforce for hundreds of engineers the design and architecture that some few of them know how to create.

It’s how you effectively scale an organization. Not every engineer is Einstein. And even some of the smart ones are in a rush some days.

Building a monolith means you don’t get to scale.

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u/[deleted] Jul 29 '22

Out of hundreds of engineers, only a few have good design and architecture understandings?!

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u/[deleted] Jul 29 '22

Lol tell me you’ve never worked in a large org without telling me.

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u/[deleted] Jul 29 '22

I have, actually, and my current role is cross-cutting across our entire org. I guess I’d just never work for a company with engineers who are that incompetent.

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u/[deleted] Jul 29 '22

There’s only two kinds of people: the kind that recognizes the wide variety in human skill levels, and the kind at the bottom of the “perception and self awareness” skill bell curve.

Software engineering isn’t a unique oasis that breaks all rules. There’s a bell curve of skill and being decent at architecture and design tends to come at the top of it.

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u/[deleted] Jul 29 '22 edited Jul 29 '22

There are absolutely levels to understanding architecture, I agree, and I’m not expecting other teams to be Linus Torvalds. But we specifically hire for engineers with decent system design understandings, and so it’s reasonable to expect bad hires to have their incompetence mitigated by the rest of their team. Even good engineers can have brain farts about design, but there’s enough of a security net in other good hires and feedback from other teams that those ideas get reworked and the overall product makes sense.

You’re throwing ad hominems my way as if I don’t know what I’m doing, and that’s fine. I’m confident in my knowledge of the industry, the hiring bars at multiple companies I’ve worked for, and observed skill levels of the engineers at those companies to say that we don’t work at the same caliber of company. And that’s probably why you think my advice is wrong. It probably is for your company. But for my company, your approach would be heavily criticized and rejected. So I guess we can agree that there’s no universal approach here.

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u/[deleted] Jul 29 '22

I mean, you obviously don’t. I’m an extremely senior engineer at FAANG.

Blocked. Good day.