[tluyben2]

Having to tell my team that our product, their baby, had to be rewritten (because our competitors were gaining on us and we had accrued too much tech debt: new features took forever and the result was slow performance wise) and then motivating them to work on that rewrite with the same enthusiasm as the old product. There were over 200 people working on it and it almost went wrong because a lot of people kept trying to shove parts of the old product in making everything slow and buggy. But it worked out in the end and we came out of that really well.

Edit: my colleagues did not actually get really motivated until we deployed our first client on the new system which did make the whole thing very stressful for me because it was too much of an uphill battle. Once deployed, it was so much more performant and so much more stable that we all saw we would be spending far less time fixing bugs or trying to squeeze out performance: that changed everything.

[giantg2]

How did you get people to listen to your suggestion to rewrite, or did you have that authority?

I made similar suggestions to my boss about a system once. They basically told me it would never happen and to stop thinking about stuff like that so I could focus on the day to day stuff. Well, 2 years later and they outsourced that entire group to a company who will end up rewriting the system...

[tluyben2]

I was the CTO.

[giantg2]

Edit: this comment misunderstood the parent

[detaro]

CIO and CTO ar quite different roles, so why do you think how your company does it has any relevance to what tluyben2 has done? Why do you think they are talking about your company?

[giantg2]

My bad. I see they were responding to the leading question of my post, not the situation part of it.

[tluyben2]

You are right, I should have quoted the top so it was clearer what I was answering to.

[uchiga]

Its cheaper to have an external group do the rewrite since they can maintain the code going forward.

[chris_j]

What motivated you to rewrite it rather than fixing the debt in the old product?

[tluyben2]

It was a ~8 year old mix and mesh of tech was not really fixable. We also got too many requests for enterprise clients for Java. And that would have been impossible. We more than doubled in revenue after the rewrite because now we could go for fortune 500 countries.

It was a different time: the product was a combi of perl, php, c++. And then the business world, at least here, went over to java backends.

[chris_j]

Many thanks for the explanation. If the product is built using different tech from what you want to use then a rewrite does make a lot of sense.

[tluyben2]

Cannot edit anymore but: countries is meant to be companies.