[hendzen]

Do you not consider Stripe to be a competent team?

Please, name some F500 companies using RethinkDB to power critical infrastructure. There are many using MongoDB. While Rethink is widely renowned among the HN set it is nonexistent in comparison when looking at actual deployments.

The reigning HN view of MongoDB being a buggy mess is outdated. Yes, they overmarketed a buggy project in 2009. It didn't matter, because they built a product that developers loved (and continue to love) to use. RethinkDB didn't aggressively market itself, and look where it is now - defunct. Mongo used that momentum to raise money and hire an incredible engineering team, including Keith Bostic, one of the fathers of Unix, and Michael Cahill, the inventor of the transaction isolation mechanism used in Postgres. Sometimes you need to employ aggressive business tactics to get to a point where you have the engineering resources to build a world class project. Moreso when you need to catch up to millions of man hours spent building Oracle and MSSQL.

[dijit]

ah, the "x uses y so it must be good" fallacy

I should note that I work for a multi-national gaming company and we use software that is ABSOLUTELY not fit for purpose, but once you have a hard dependency on something and the cost of muddling through is _less_ than the cost of a rewrite then you're going to be stuck supporting it.

This is the reality of technology in enterprise.

[hendzen]

That specific point was in reply to the GP's statement that "competent teams" weren't using it in production.

[lotyrin]

I don't think it should be taken as given that there's a correlation between competency and the size of an organization that a team exists within, and I don't think such a correlation, when combined with large organizations' usage of MongoDB would challenge the assertion that there exists an anticorrelation between team competency and use of MongoDB.

Looking at the numbers, larger organizations straight-forwardly seem like they should be more likely to eventually hire mediocre talent, survive despite having done so, and more likely to have adopted any given tool.

[geocar]

I think you're looking at it wrong. It's not a popularity contest; I've seen billion dollar companies use fucking stupid tooling as well, but they still have the right processes where they don't lose data.

Mongo, on the other hand, loses data.

[lotyrin]

In non-tech centric large orgs, it seems you frequently do not have the talent required to be be both risk averse and productive at the same time, so "IT" becomes a risk averse and non-productive political structure from which springs an "alternative IT" rebellion group (if the initiative is lead from above) or many little cowboy teams (if the initiative is driven from below) and these will be "productive" at the expense of having no processes for avoiding stupid risks that, amongst other things, can lead to data loss.

[hendzen]

You speak of "correlation" and "looking at the numbers" but provide no data. What exactly is your point?

[lotyrin]

The point? How do you draw a line from "Fortune 500s use Mongo" to "Mongo is used by competent teams"?

I specifically challenge that you can do so, given a model of a large organization as being necessarily more diverse (regressing to the mean of general competency, more likely to have facts like "org Y uses tech X" being true) and more robust to survive failures as it grows.

We don't have data, but we can still model (if nothing else, to think about what data we would need).

[keithnz]

as an aside, Stripe are putting money in to support RethinkDB