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by _ea1k 1064 days ago
Having worked in both kinds of cultures, I tend to agree. Keeping up is ultimately less pain than trying to upgrade things in huge chunks.

But it can be really hard to change the culture at a place that has a long history of "ain't broke, don't fix it" engineering.

1 comments

Less pain yes but more efficient? I'm not sure.

The places that don't do constant upgrades also don't usually have teams looking after that. If they time it right they can do with less people.

Of course it's less reliable not having as much active knowledge but I do think it can be cheaper if nothing goes wrong.

Yes, that can be the tradeoff, and a reasonable one in the right circumstances. Some projects are like that where there is really no team dedicated to anything more than keeping the lights on.

In my comment, I was thinking of well staffed (or at least close-enough to well staffed) teams making deliberate decisions to defer.