When Should We Ditch Our Platform? 622
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?"
measure the hype (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Which platform? (Score:2, Insightful)
A few questions (Score:3, Insightful)
Last time my company hired a new programmer, we had trouble. However it had more to do with the local job market, a general lack of IT talent in the area and other human factors (pay, benefits, etc...).
You know when you are asking about an older technology when most of the younger applicants give you a blank stare and the older ones sit there for a minute thinking about the last time they used it.
Re:Which platform? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you know what platform he's talking about, opinions would be skewed based on what people think of that platform. It would be a distraction.
Not knowing the specifics makes it easier to provide the general answers he's looking for.
Wrong Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes, you can't ditch soon enough (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Based on my complete lack of experience... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Which platform? (Score:5, Insightful)
What platform? (Score:2, Insightful)
Jokes about Fortran might be funny, but without knowing what your platform is, we can only answer in very vague ways. If you can't find anybody to work on this platform, and can't train anybody, then you need to replace the platform now and you have no choice. But this probably isn't really true -- what's more likely is that people who know this platform are hard to find or want to be well paid and it becomes a tradeoff. How much is invested in the platform? How much work to move to something else? And what to move to? We need more details
Re:Which platform? (Score:5, Insightful)
He wants to know, generically, how you decide that what you're using is the wrong choice.
Sounds like you already made a decision... (Score:5, Insightful)
When you start to experience those things in your platform, its usually time to start an exit strategy.
Without knowing the platform, how could we say? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Use proven technology (Score:2, Insightful)
But here are a few tips anyway, perhaps they can make your decision easier:
So, in a nutshell, I recommend Perl, Postgresql and FreeBSD. Plenty of experienced developers, and the tools Just Work.
languages, talent, and community (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Well, what is the platform? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Which platform? (Score:2, Insightful)
News flash, when asking for an opinion about something, you have to tell people what that something is so that they know which opinion they're supposed to be giving you. I suppose I could just run down the list and toss out an opinion of every platform that's ever existed and you could make your decision based on that, but that really wastes rather a lot of time don't you think.
When the cost of maintaining it... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Which platform? (Score:2, Insightful)
If the system is already fully developed and no major changes are expected, that's a plus for sticking to their guns.
If they can find an already-good web developer who's willing to pick up a new platform (and they're in no rush to change it much), that's another plus for sticking with it.
If the system itself is older, then a rewrite becomes more reasonable even if it works great.
Is the website largely static? Platform barely matters then.
Is the site Java based? Dump that trash, because only bitches use Java.
That is some of my totally unbiased generic input.
Maybe it would be a good idea if a list of current "optimal" systems were given out. On second thought, though, maybe it would be better if the actual platform were named, as any ProductX blasting would still contain a few useful threads.
Asking the wrong questions.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Which platform? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Wrong Question (Score:2, Insightful)
If you expect things like this to happen, write them down as risks and take them into consideration when you're doing your design and plans. I understand a lot of people, especially with web code, want to sit down and just start writing until it works. At the very least laying, down the framework ahead of time will save you headache in instances like this.
I guess when dealing with this, the best thing you can try to do is get your people to document their code and keep it as neatly modularized as possible. If you know what you had to write for your previous app, you can bet you'll be needing very similar functions/methods in the app created in the new language.
If you have abstraction, switching is a LOT easier (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
If you have a good abstraction layer, even the most proprietary platform won't lock you in.
Re:Which platform? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What platform? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that tells you something about why people choose Microsoft no matter what. Quite often the decision to go with a cool, new technology is not a good one simply because it is new and cool. Old and boring generally always wins in this industry.
True Solution to your problem (Score:3, Insightful)
1) When you look the technology up on monster.com, how many results do you get?
2) Does the technology have an active community? How supported is it?
3) How big is your site?
4) How much are you willing to spend for someone to maintain it, convert it, implement it etc?
5) What is your time span?
I've done a hell of a lot of conversion from PHP and ASP to ColdFusion simply because companies want a language that's easy for other developers to come behind and figure what's going on. Like ALL code... even ColdFusion can be made to look ugly by a bad developer.
The most important thing is what many echoed already. Pick a language that has years of support behind it with an active community. You'll find your developers easily then. It also prevents the entrenchment technique used by bad developers.
Re:Which platform? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want something that actually requires an answer, you need to give more details. What's making him think of switching platforms? What's costing so much in maintenance or in finding people that it's just not worth it? Are these difficulties in his head, or is he actually having problems?
My guess is that he's talking about ruby on rails, because it's got a lot of hype and it's short on people with the necessary skill set. My answer in that instance would be, don't go with a young platform in the first place. Don't buy into hype until it's so mature that it doesn't have any hype, just a good solid list of pros and cons.
But maybe he's using
Perhaps he's using LAMP on either perl or php. If it's perl, he should shift to php as soon as possible, because perl code becomes very hard to maintain the longer it goes and developers are fewer and higher paid. He might have a problem with php because the developers lack the professional focus, in which case he should tighten his hiring practices.
Those are just some of the possible scenarios, and each of them requires a different response. The variables going into platform decisions are so complex that asking for an analysis without giving details requires a response that would be well over a hundred pages. He deserves credit for coming to the proper forum for his question (instead of asking a legal question, like "when is it legal for me to take my children without my ex-wife knowing?"), but that doesn't change the fact that any discussion which arises will be based on things that almost certainly don't answer his question.
did other factors come in to play? (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't you really mean it took a long time to find someone ..... who was willing to work for you?
Without wishing to start an argument, web developers aren't exactly the rarest species of techy. Unless you have something truly bizarre, a remote location, or are paying peanuts, it shouldn't need much more than a "webmaster wanted" ad. to have them queuing round the block.
Did you interview lots,, and not choose any - or was it simply that no-one wanted to take the job?
(silly thought - did you consider recruiting someone without the skills, then training them?)
The Platform? It's Ruby (on Rails) (Score:5, Insightful)
- 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
Re:Solution (Score:2, Insightful)
What is your job description? (Score:3, Insightful)
Whenever management decides on software it is by reading one-sided literature distributed by the software vendors. Never a true story. Then it is cost driven. Never mind that the platform cannot possibly solve the business problem.
Tell the developer(s) your problem. They know what the application needs to do and which different solutions can get them there. If you hire good programmers, they will make good decisions, that is OUR expertise.
When management or marketing (or worst of all -- sales) get to contribute to decisions for software platforms for development, something is REALLY WRONG.
I tend to "Pink Floyd" in situations like this.
i.e. "Run Like Hell"
Don't assume it's the platform (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Which platform? (Score:3, Insightful)
PHP + Zend Framework [zend.com] - seriously
The problem with your statement... (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed, you should switch when the cost of switching is less than the cost of continuing with your current platform... but realizing that is obviously not the tricky part.
The tricky part is knowing WHEN switching costs less than continuing with the current platform. That can be a very difficult question to answer, and involves looking at many, many factors.
Re:Which platform? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that's the point. He doesn't want us to assess the situation for him, he wants us to identify what the factors are that he should take into account to do the assessment himself.
If he leaves the assessment to the SlashHorde, the factors that will be used will include religious bias. He's trying to eliminate that.
Re:Which platform? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Which platform? (Score:5, Insightful)
ROFL. That's like saying I stuck with Windows 95 because I wanted to stay away from XP.
Even 1.4 JVM is considered dated by todays standards and still way better then 1.1.
Be sure you're not overvaluing platform knowledge (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're running on platform X and you keep advertising for developers with 3 years of platform X experience or turning away really skilled people who have been working on some other, similar platform, the problem is your hiring. If you're advertising for good developers in your application domain and they're not accepting offers, then the platform may be at least a marketing problem (which can be a serious problem indeed).
But if, say, you're using Ruby heavily, there's no significant reason not to hire experienced Python or Perl developers (or vice-versa); if they're any good, they'll pick it up very quickly. There are limits; obviously if you're doing C development on an MMU-less embedded system, you don't want a great Visual Basic developer who's never worked with explicit memory management before. But if the developer is skilled in the application domain that you're working in, that's a lot more significant than knowing even the language (let alone the IDE or libraries) that you're using.
Re:Which platform? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Which platform? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, sounds so simple -- except you've missed a critical variable: how much does it cost to maintain after the switch.
If the cost of post-switch maintenance is only 80% as much per year as the pre-switch cost (a generous estimate in most cases), and the switch takes you only six months (another generous estimate), it's a 2.5 year ROI. Meaning you'll actually be behind where you would have been for 2.5 years before getting any advantage out of the switch. How many businesses can weather that?
I've never seen anyone correctly estimate the cost of switching. Partly because they underestimate the costs of maintenance after switching, believing in the glowing code Utopia of the promised platform. And partly because rebuilding from scratch is usually much more time consuming than people expect: most working systems have lots of tedious, forgettable, but absolutely critical code that must be rewritten and debugged.
To answer the original poster's question: if you've got a substantial working system (read: reasonable performance and reliability) stick with it. Almost any platform can be set up well enough that a decent programmer can work well with it. If the maintenance is such trouble it may be that the programmer sucked, not the platform. In that case, a good programmer can slowly replace the most troublesome components and bring it in line for probably less than the cost of a full switch.
If you can't find programmers who are expert in your platform, look for programmers who are generally experienced and hungry to learn your platform. They're often better anyways.
If the system as it stands doesn't work (read: has major performance or reliability problems), then a switch is a more reasonable option.
Cheers.
Re:Which platform? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Which platform? (Score:3, Insightful)
Been there, done that, rather not do it again. Better to have a pool of people from whom you must determine who sucks, who doesn't, who's a scheister, and who's the straight shooter than a pool of one who could be any combination of the above.
Re:Holy negativity pal (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Which platform? (Score:4, Insightful)
Python seems like it is better for maintenance but that is from just a quick look.
Re:Which platform? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Which platform? (Score:4, Insightful)
Php has its place, and it's easy to develop in, but if you can do everything you ever need to do in php, you have pretty simple needs.
Re:When the cost of maintaining it... (Score:5, Insightful)
I speak from experience. I apparently set someone off in upper management, and the process was set in motion to replace me. When the company received no applications (they placed the salary range in the ad), they removed the salary and asked for salary requirements. My supervisor, who was reviewing the resumes, actually resigned when he saw how underpaid he was!
I got a small raise, I am above the minimum range, but not close the the average for my position. I stayed only because I was already holding on a security clearance to come through for another job. Took 6 months, but it came through and I'll be resigning myself shortly .
Never let management/HR tell you "they can't find anyone." Odds are they are too cheap to pay market.
All depends on what you write (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Which platform? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Asking the wrong questions.... (Score:3, Insightful)
This suggests a good rule of thumb for replacing a platform:
If a sold-seeming programmer you're about to hire says "You're using platform X? Oh god no, I'm not interested in this job anymore." more than once, it's time to switch platforms.
Re:Which platform? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Holy negativity pal (Score:3, Insightful)
To put it another way, a programmer with access to a compiler can get whatever kind of illicit software he wants onto a computer without you knowing; they just program it themselves on the spot if necessary. Any precautions that presume otherwise are foolhardy and give a false sense of security, and can certainly seem foolish as an excuse to prohibit certain activities that would be otherwise harmless.
I've never worked in an environment where any of this applies though, so I may be misconstruing what's going on here.
Re:Holy negativity pal (Score:2, Insightful)
+ Too hard for us to administer (yes your highness)
That's their job. They answer to their boss and must be able to confirm to them particular policies are in operation.
+ We can't run our anti-virus on your computer (ahem, I don't need that crap)
Just because your Linux/Mac OS X machine might not fall to a virus or trojan, doesn't mean your machine isn't capable of acting as a 'Typhoid Mary' -- capable of passing them to others. That's leaving aside whether they trust you and your chosen distro to keep up to date patches going.
+ We can't tell if you're running unlicensed software on that computer (why don't you just like, ask me?)
Because if you lie (and from experience, users do lie about these things) it can cost gigantic amounts of money in penalties if they're audited.
+ We can't tell if you're running encryption software of packet sniffers you would-be corporate spy?
Their general auditing tool is probably specialised for Microsoft environments. Again, the cost of being wrong (their entire client list or source code going missing or other sensitive information getting where it shouldn't) outweighs the needs of one whiney user -- unless you can give them a good business case as to why your need overrides the risk, you'll be out of luck. Sorry about that.
For some reason, a few of the sysadmins I've met aren't clued into the fact that you can get source-code and compile it into a binary and then execute it. Pretty standard stuff. Software doesn't *have* to be installed using some wizard-install-software, and never need show up on any audit.
I suspect they'd notice the installation of a compiler though where it shouldn't exist ;-).
Perhaps you could scan the computer for filenames of well-known software, but that wouldn't stop someone who knew what they're doing.
Don't underestimate a good Windows policy editor. There are many places where things are extremely well locked down.
I asked one "top" resource if he'd let me use it anyway if I could sniff the network from a windows box without "installing" any software - he looked at me like a criminal.
Well, you'd just admitted plotting to breach network security and likely breach terms of your employment contract. No wonder! ;-). Rather than bitching about sysadmin stubbornness, you should be thanking them for not reporting the incident to your manager and it turning into a formal warning or instant dismissal.
Re:Which platform? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Which platform? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:ha ha (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Which platform? (Score:3, Insightful)
Could only be ColdFusion (Score:2, Insightful)
Nobody's considered the real dead end technology of late: ColdFusion. Yes, sites still run it. No, its not quite dead yet. Yes, Adobe provides and has provided plenty of hype to fool managers into deploying things to it.