| HN Mirror

The company that bought mine spent two years trying to have Team A rewrite a part of our critical service as a separate service to make it more scalable and robust and to enable it to do more. They wanted to do stupid things like "Lets use GRPC because google does!" and "Django is slow" and "database access is slow (but we've added like six completely new database lookups per request for uh reasons)"

They failed so damn bad and it's hilariously bad and I feel awful for the somewhat competent coworker who was stuck on that team and dealt with how awful it was.

Then we fired most of that team like 3 times because of how value negative they have been.

Then my coworker and I rebuilt it in java in 2 months. It is 100x faster, has almost no bugs, accidentally avoided tons of data management bugs that plague the python version (because java can't have those problems the way we wrote it) and I built us tooling to achieve bug for bug compatibility (using trivial to patch out helpers), and it is trivially scalable but doesn't need to because it's so much faster and uses way less memory.

If the people in charge of a project are fucking incompetent yeah nothing good will ever happen, but if you have even semi-competent people under reasonable management (neither of us are even close to rockstars) and the system you are trying to rewrite has obvious known flaws, plenty of time you will build a better system.