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0 pointsrkangel5y ago0 comments

There's an alternative presentation of the same facts:

Not being bound by the traditions of the large enterprise they used to work for, they're free to choose a stack that might help them be more productive. As an added benefit it helps recruitment - against the long hours and (relatively) low pay of startup work, they get to balance a mission and the opportunity to work with interesting technology.

My actual beliefs are somewhere in between. I think the 'fast moving' world of javascript frameworks is a major contributor here as almost anything you chose in the last 5 years is obsolete.

Not all tech stacks are predominantly web though. You might decide to build in Erlang/Elixir. You would be using something that's 30 years old, proven, not going out of fashion any time soon and the right tool for a lot of jobs. You'd be more productive in it than C++/Java, but that's what most enterprises would require.

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danjac5y ago

Productivity is relative. A tech stack that might give you some easy early gains might fail you at 3 a.m. when the site's down and you have no idea how to fix it. Your code might contain some basic security errors that you would have avoided had you gone with a stable, vetted framework, and now hackers have all your customer data (see for example Parler). Recruitment in tech X is much harder because there's nobody around with decent experience in it.

These are all problems that you really don't want when your focus needs to be on the business. By all means adopt new tech where there is a real business need, and by all means avoid obsolete tech where you can, but be wary of the siren call of the cool tech stack when you're starting a new company.

pkolaczk5y ago

> Your code might contain some basic security errors that you would have avoided had you gone with a stable, vetted framework

On the flip side, stable and vetted popular frameworks also have security problems; and although these problems may be less likely, they are more bad people trying to break them, because when they do, the win is really big. E.g. Windows vs Linux viruses / trojans - I'm not sure if Linux is so much more secure to justify the difference.

Also new tech stacks typically evolve faster and are quicker to fix bugs. It is much faster to fix a problem in a young, less complex product, without having to deal with things like technical debt, backwards compatibility with millions of apps or endless discussions between committers about how it should be fixed.

rkangelOP5y ago

My point with Erlang though is that there are several mature and sensible tech choices that Big Enterprise (TM) can make it difficult to use.

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