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1070 points dondraper36 | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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codingwagie ◴[] No.45069135[source]
I think this works in simple domains. After working in big tech for a while, I am still shocked by the required complexity. Even the simplest business problem may take a year to solve, and constantly break due to the astounding number of edge cases and scale.

Anyone proclaiming simplicity just hasnt worked at scale. Even rewrites that have a decade old code base to be inspired from, often fail due to the sheer amount of things to consider.

A classic, Chesterton's Fence:

"There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”"

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1. bdangubic ◴[] No.45070586[source]
every complex domain and “at scale” is just a bunch of simple things in disguise… our industry is just terrible in general about breaking things down. we sort of know this so we came up with shit things like “microservices” but you spend sufficient time in the industry (almost three decades for me) and you won’t find a single place that has microservices architecture than you haven’t wished was a monolith :) we are just terrible at this… there is no complex domain, it is just a good excuse we use to justify things
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2. zhouzhao ◴[] No.45070637[source]
Oh boy, this is the best example of "I have been doing it the same way for 30 years" I have ever seen in the world wild web
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3. fijiaarone ◴[] No.45071035[source]
Google and Amazon were doing things at roughly the same scale* 20 years ago on slower hardware and less of it.

* They might be serving twice as much (but definitely not ten times as much) as they were in 2005 but mostly that scales horizontally very easily.