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by ericb 2378 days ago
You're not wrong about the size of the dev team and turnover.

At the same time, I'm not sure if taking 2 months to get productive is a win? Wasn't one of the angular "upgrades" a total rewrite? What is the overhead of maintaining a second tightly coupled front-end app. I found doubling the surface area seemed to square the effort, not double it. How much of that productivity is illusory and could be done with fewer people?

Some folks are upvoting the heck out of my comment. I presume some portion of those are devs who might like working in a place without JS dependency package/upgrade/language/promise hell?

1 comments

I work for an enterprise company with more than 70,000 employees. Standing up a team and getting them productive in 2 months is basically unheard of at this level.

This community is heavily biased to small companies, startups, and students. I'd be hesitant to judge their approval as affirmations that you are doing the "right thing".

> affirmations that you are doing the "right thing."

I'm not really looking for approbations--I'm happy to play this business game with a speed optimized team and see how my strategy fairs on merits against competitors maintaining two apps to my one. I'll make that bet all day long.

I'd say hold up and question your assumption that there is a "right thing" at all.

In terms of the perception of what is the "right thing", and the startup bias of this place, that could be true. I'd add though, that there's a reason houses are not made of rebar reinforced concrete. It's too expensive to work and rework. From that, I'd generalize that certain architectural patterns work better in some cases, and in others they are overkill. Wood works fine, and it is faster and cheaper to build with. And if you have to knock it down, you can rebuild the next one for cheap too. Neither is "right."

It depends a lot on the customers. The tools we make are mostly B2B and are "premium". We are never first to market, but our tools are trusted over our "competitiors" ( I have put that in quotes and one of our competitors owns 30% of our firm), and this means get more customers because of the trust in robust tools (rebar reinforced concrete).