[devonkim]

The Java ecosystem is culturally heavyweight and verbose with the needs of very large, bureaucratic organizations and Spring is one of the biggest examples of it (although Spring Boot has done a fair bit to modernize workflows). The struggle I can point to with a previous company was that our Java based stack made hiring extremely hard for our small company because large companies with deep pockets could hire for largely the same job at double our budgets, and for people wanting to work on sexier languages and platforms such as Rust, Go, or even Python other small companies offered that freedom. The hiring pipeline was so problematic it’s led to several years of delays rolling out features that the rest of the market has had and whatever intrinsic advantages the business had is possibly irrelevant as even the larger players have been able to do 99% of the same things.

So being able to quickly move is a large advantage of being a smaller organization and anything that demonstrably hurts that advantage should be stricken from the company’s investments ASAP as long as it stays small and has no other material market advantage.

It really all depends upon what makes sense for one’s situation but I was very frustrated with our hiring pipeline and the outdated stack made things much more complicated to do basic things than it should have.