Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by edmundhuber 2901 days ago
A lot of these things that you're pointing out are pretty vague. To pick apart one: "devops", it can mean "using docker", and/or "continuous deployment of configs", and/or "greater developer empowerment", and/or "no dedicated infrastructure team", etc.

IMO, attacking all of "devops" (or "agile", or "cloud computing") at once is not productive, because it means so many things. So if you don't get specific, as others have said, it makes you seem like you just oppose new things.

For example with devops, a very rational concern is that if the infrastructure team shrinks or disappears, then there's no one on the hook for making things all work at the same time. If you leave it to the developers of each team to make their thing work, you are likely to have a continually broken development environment.

A good argument to oppose any change without a clear rationale for the change occurring is "if it ain't broke don't fix it." This, at least, leads to someone explaining why change is necessary, and then from there perhaps you can have a conversation.

2 comments

My problem with "if it ain't broken don't fix it" is that there can be many different definitions -- end levels within each definition -- of broken, especially in complex systems. Take a standard example of a software app which is working as it's supposed to (so it's "not broken" in one sense) but is a mess of spaghetti code which makes it insanely difficult to add new functionalities (so it's "broken" in a different sense).

When you look at it it becomes clear that it is important to understand which levels and definitions of "brokenness" are possible in your case, and even more importantly which of them matter and how much. Only then you can look at each proposed solution to find out which of the important problems it solves and how well.

"If it ain't broke don't fix it" is absolutely a strawman, I agree. The point is to seed a discussion.
Thanks - I think the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" approach is valid but often there are real world issues that need resolving.