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When Should We Ditch Our Platform?
odoketa writes "My organization recently had to replace our Web developer. It took us an extremely long time to find someone with the necessary skill set. I don't know if this is because of the platform we are running (which I will leave nameless), or simply because the fates conspiring against us. It's easy to assume that languages or platforms are popular based on buzz, but the rubber hits the road when you have to hire someone to maintain that code. How are folks out there determining when you've backed the wrong horse, and getting back on track?"
Stop using FORTRAN. It really wasn't built for the web, you know.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
How do you expect Slashdot readers to tell you whether to ditch your platform unless they know whether it is Microsoft or not?
Fortran works better than anything else on punch cards.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Everybody always says about the various platform/language wars, use what you can to get the job done. Since you said "web developer" and not "web developers", I assume the project isn't that large, or at least isn't large enough where you can't afford to do a bit of a re-write. The thing that is more important to me than language and platform, is design. If you have a good design, then refactoring your code_base into a different platform, shouldn't be all that impossible. (Remember, I'm assuming your application/site isn't really really big) And if you don't have a good design, then you need to redesign anyways. Just my two cents though.
You'll have that sometimes...
Yes, this does, in fact, mean that if one of our application servers dies and has to be re-baselined for any reason, our entire application[1] is down for over a month and will cost us several thousand dollars in re-installation fees alone.
[1]The entire application is a system of interlinked application servers, each of which has a different role in the system and each of which represents a single point of failure.
I know what you're thinking: You're thinking we should have ditched the development platform before we ever even implemented it.
But you're wrong. We should have ditched the developer platform the moment they came up with this hare-brained scheme.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
This is probably not a great idea. Instead, consider broadening your hiring criteria, and hiring people who don't have experience with that particular platform, but know the application domain well. For example, if you're a PHP shop and you need someone to maintain PHPNuke, but can't find anyone, consider bringing in someone who knows Slash or some other Web logging software and has a grasp of the technology.
Make one of the new guy's first tasks the evaluation of competing products and the overhead involved in moving to them, not with an eye to switching, but just to get a lay of the land and further expose him to a breadth of approaches. Periodically, send him off to appropriate conferences too.
All together, you'll end up with a well-rounded employee who can speak to the costs and benefits of your platform.
If sensible individuals in the organization are starting to question whether or not the platform needs to be replaced, then it probably does. Because usually those discussions don't come about unless you've hit a wall of some sort: performance, unavailability of employees with those skills, incompatability, unsupportability, deprecation, et cetera.
When you start to experience those things in your platform, its usually time to start an exit strategy.
You could be talking about anything from RealBasic to perl. Without knowing, we can't even speculate on whether you can't find someone because demand is so high that they've all been snapped up, or because the product is dead.
In general, I tend to look for a healthy third-party community. If there are multiple third-party sites, well run, with competent spelling and grammar, and no legal affiliation with the primary vendor, that's a good sign.
Examples: Ruby, python, perl, C.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
we train monkeys to shout 1's and 0's at computers. The Monkeys are happy.
And I recommend Ruby on Rails. Its developer community has been growing exponentially, from 5 guys in 2006 to 10 guys in 2007. If you are extra conservative, you can try Groovy on Rails. It's just like Java, but better.
Platform choice should come down to three things, IMHO:
Having said those points, DO NOT switch platforms just to make your developer happy. If you have a staff of architects and developers and they all agree that some new platform is better in the short- and long-run, then go ahead and switch. But if this is just the whim of 2-3 guys, tell them NO.
One last point: if/when you do switch, make sure the clock drives the functionality, not the other way around. If you let functionality drive the clock, you'll be 4 years and several million dollars into a nightmare. Set a deadline (a REAL deadline) of 6 months and take what you get at the end of that 6 months. your developer crew (internal or external) will be augmenting and building out on that platform no matter what, so you're far better off having something cuick and crude rather than late and fancy. I cannot emphasize this point enough.
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It matters, because it relates to why you might be unable to find any people for it. It might be a really obscure one that requires deep knowledge. Any programmer worth his salt should be able to switch between PHP/ASP/Perl/Ruby and the likes with relative ease. Did you look for a programmer worth his salt or did you search for someone with 10 years experience with Vista? The more obscure and closed the platform, the less likely you are to find someone with specific knowledge and them more you will just have to hire someone who can train himself on the job.
The easiest way to determining if your platform has support is to look through personal ads, is nobody else hiring people with those skills, then you got to wonder why. Browse for tutorials, see the forums for that platform for activity.
The way to avoid this in the future is to remain low-tech. Don't tie yourself to deeply into solutions crafted onto solutions. For instance use PHP, not bloody frameworks build on that. If you then use a software suit, build on a framework, build on a language, build on a platform, well you are going to have problems finding someone with those exact skills.
Oh and replace PHP with whatever language you prefer.
I see this all the time, some company buys a solution, does some half assed training, do half of the updates that are available and then a couple of years later when the site is hopelessly out of date wonders why they can't find anyone who responds for their personal ads.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
... exceeds the cost of replacing it.
P.S.
I don't buy this "we couldn't find anyone" BS. Were you, by chance, using a 2 year old technology, and your HR drones were looking for someone who "must have 5 years experience" with it. Were you looking for a laundry list of tools, apps, and domain knowledge that, realistically, no-one except the previous employee had? You could, you know, find someone with a modicum of intelligence and [*gasp*] train them. Did you insist on someone with a degree to do little more than cut and paste text files? Were you paying at the market rate? I suspect that the problem was more with your hiring process than with your technology. If it was purely a technology problem, then the answer would be obvious and you wouldn't be asking us.
"I've found that the more a manufacturer hypes a product the more likely it is to be a flash in the pan...
--
When is the last time you hadn't thrown your vote away? Ron Paul even if its write-in!"
The Irony is... overwhelming.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
So .. you can't find someone with the right 'skill set'.
... go find some smart people and let them loose. They'll take care of it.
Maybe what you really need are smarter programmers. Anyone who has talent can pick up new languages, especially when they need to maintain an existing system and not create a new one from scratch. Ignoring C++ developers simply because one has a Java web platform (or WebSphere because one has a JBOSS environment) is just plain ignorant. All languages share common elements, and good developers use those elements to pick up the nuances of syntax. All application servers share common elements, and good application support staff can learn new ones.
Every time I hear a developer or app support person say 'I don't know that', I just want to reach across the room and ask them how stupid they are. The smart ones get online, research, and learn it very quickly, the non-as-smart ones use their ignorance to stay in their comfort zone. I'd rather find the smart ones, because in 6 months there are going to be more changes in the computer industry and I would want staff that can adapt.
So
Then, once you get those smart people that have experience in other areas, work with them to determine what platform to go to, or if you even need to.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
This is why you write an abstraction layer to sit between your business logic and the platform. Lets take databases as an example. Suppose your application is initially written for MySQL. Now, lets say that your application becomes a big hit, and you want to move it to a more robust backend. If you're application is tied directly to the platform (i.e. you've peppered your code with direct MySQL calls), you've got a lot of work in development and testing to make sure that all of the MySQL stuff is replaced with Oracle equivalents. However, if you've got an abstraction layer, the only things you have to rewrite and retest are the components of the abstraction layer. Its not zero work with the latter strategy, but it is a lot less work.
This is actually one of the gripes I have against web programming as it stands today. It seems to me that programmers are far too eager to call the database directly from their application, without using any sort of abstraction layer. Sure, its faster to create the application without an abstraction layer, but it makes porting the app to another backend an absolute nightmare.
Some lock you in more than others, but I think it would be quite difficult to switch between them, if you had a reasonable amount of code.If you have a good abstraction layer, even the most proprietary platform won't lock you in.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Deleted
(And no, AS/400 is not the name of an obscure Linux distro, and RPG does not mean "role playing game" or even "rocket propelled grenade"--it's much worse than that...)
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
He said all the right words to point to Ruby or ROR as the platform they chose:
.NET/LAMP/Perl/Python in terms of available production man power.
- The illusion of popularity based upon buzz
- Lack of employable gurus who are familiar with production level platform development.
Most of the folks who have the latter work for a firm or work as "consultants". There are few folks with enterprise or production experience with ruby systems to actually employ to develop and maintain an entire codebase, especially one expected to be a jack-of-all-trades, as their 'single web developer' issue probably requires him to be.
I'm not saying that Ruby isn't a great development platform. I'm just pointing out that it's adoption and dissemination have not allowed it to reach the stage of
--- I'm going sane in a crazy world.
As the Senior Web Developer, I've been tasked with interviewing and hiring my team.
It's been extremely difficult finding candidates because for website design and development, there is an extremely high ratio of signal to noise in quality candidates.
I've only been able to find 3 people worth interviewing after posting a junior position on several job boards and with several staffing agencies. And we're using an extremely common platform and set of services.
Anyone who's fired up design mode in Dreamweaver thinks they're a qualified developer. And anyone who's created something in Flash thinks they're a qualified designer.
And the talented people who are easy to find, are frequently only interested in freelance work because they want the flexibility.
As for actually switching your development stack, it's doable. Don't try to switch existing clients and projects, instead setup your new stack and only put new projects on it. There will be a learning curve, but if the end results show a significant improvement, it will be well worth it. Don't try to force in-progress projects, or old projects onto the new stack. Once you've done some work with the new stack, how feasible migrations are will become better apparent.
I've used this method for switching web development stacks several times. From plain old HTML, to ASP/IIS, to PHP/Apache, to Object-oriented PHP, and finally to an OSS CMS that we like. Old sites are only migrated to a new stack if we are redoing the design or functionality as a new project. Otherwise we just deal with the old and focus on making the new the best we can.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Well...
They develop web applications but only ever test them on windows. These are apps for the government that are for general consumption. Not having a single OS X or Linux testing station is plain wrong. But hay, at least the corporate types got the contract right? Never mind doing the job properly, or even learning what that means.
Also, testing things on Linux, Windows and OS X is a great way to make sure that what you're doing doesn't have hidden quirks. That goes for designing webpages as well as network shares and other network services.
I find Outlook a terribly annoying email client to use, and would prefer to use my own.
When writing documentation, I find it *much* easier to use OS X's screenshot technology and inter-app tools to bring the pieces together. This saves enough time that I frequently go home to write significant amounts of documentation, and it looks great when it is done, and it's done *fast*.
OS X and linux have a superior command line with a complement of tools that is esp. useful when you're batch processing vast volumes amounts of files. I used to write ruby scripts and run them on windows because of a lack of a command line. That is not the most efficient way of doing things. My co-workers were wowed at the things I could do that they just didn't think were feasible because they have no real experience with getting the command line to sing. Large numbers of files is typical when working on software projects.
I like using multiple desktops, I find that much faster and easier to do than work with the almost crippling windows taskbar.
And there's tones of fanboy stuff too.
What I don't get is how anybody thinks that standardizing everything on windows is somehow going to just make everything cheaper and hunky dory. People use other platforms for a reason, and using a bit of intelligence there is no reason why sysadmins can't figure it out. And you get the benefit of not grid-locking yourself into a single vendor.
To me it seems like common sense is being replaced by a rule book. That's why I left for a smaller company, and they let you run what you want - but only support you with stuff they know. It works out great.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
All that aside, I do have some commentary:It sounds like you're talking about IT Helpdesk, which I don't know much about anymore. But in the realm of "enterprise" applications (the big, customer-facing, 99.99%+ uptime moneymakers), a developer's insistence on using their own favorite OS rather than the departmental standard is, in my experience, a guarantee of systems-adminstration headaches, instability, confusion, and vulnerability. You may have a list of reasons longer than my big swinging dick as to why your OS is better than the departmental standard, but I guarantee you that once it goes into our datacenter, its nonstandard nature will cause far more problems than it solves.Contrary to popular belief, non-MS operating systems and the applications that run on them are, in fact, exploitable. And I have yet to meet a Linux developer (of which I support several) who didn't insist on flatly ignoring Linux's built-in security features (such as the permissions system, for example), because it was either easier to develop everything as root, or because he had a hard-on for some third-party app that needed to run as root, or both. Maybe your corporate Linux workstation isn't a big security threat, but all my enterprise Linux servers are just as exploitable as my Windows servers. Because it makes my developers' jobs easier.We don't ask you because we don't trust you. We don't trust you because you generally spew evil-universe stuff like this post at us. Also, we don't trust you because you obviously don't know or care about the requirements of good systems administration policy. Asking end-users if they're complying with regulatory requirements is not a sufficient test of regulatory compliance. Your refusal to acknowledge and accept this fact, and work within its framework, only serves to enhance your notoriety as a super-villain from an evil alternate universe.This last item and its explanation are complete gibberish to me. About the only thing I can say for sure is that, yes, if you want to run packet sniffers on a corporate network, then you will get looked at like a criminal.Only from your point of view. From our point of view, we're just trying to do our jobs, within a set of constraints you refuse to understand or even consider, and to prevent you in your ignorance and sense of entitlement from undoing our hard work, ruining our weekends, or putting our employer into serious legal and financial jeopardy.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
There is nothing wrong with a full up J2EE environment. It simply exists for certain specific purposes. It makes no more sense to write many applications on J2EE than it does to write web sites in FORTRAN.
On the other hand, if you write serious enterprise class middleware there is nothing better and those frameworks you find 'icky' are 100% necessary. You simply CANNOT in any sane world replicate the large scale clustering, distributed transaction management, connectors, and resource management capabilities of a good J2EE server. Furthermore you WILL need that kind of thing if you want to build a piece of software that has requirements like ABSOLUTELY no single failure under any circumstances can ever loose a transaction and you process 10k transactions per second with 5 9's reliability 24/7/365.
The other problem with most developers (most teams) is they simply don't have the training in properly designing their applications for that kind of environment. You HAVE to know all the ins and outs of where your transaction boundaries are, exactly what all the possible execution paths (exceptions especially!) are, and map it all out. Anyone that tries to build complex J2EE apps by sitting down at a keyboard and pounding keys will FAIL miserably, and they will then lament about how horrible J2EE is. No, you need to know exactly what you are going to write first. THEN when you sit down and start developing all that 'J2EE cruft' actually turns out to be your friend because most of the hard stuff is already done for you.
Its all a matter of what you're problem set is, and knowing the tools well enough.
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The thing that was cool about the
One thing that wasn't cool about the
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