5 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 27.7 ms ] thread
(comment deleted)
this is a great video to rewatch whenever interacting with non-technical stakeholders.

IMO the "microservices" architecture is kind of a failure from an economic perspective. On top of many of the talks like this one [0], which discuss things technically, microservices gave us "tech companies" employing 5-10 eng + PM + EM, which inevitably leads to "org building" and office politics, bloated engineering teams (anecdote: Musk reducing much of X staff).

I think we'll see a trend toward monorepos + high velocity programming utilizing LLMs like copilot, enabling higher productivity with smaller teams.

[0]: https://youtu.be/LcJKxPXYudE?si=zPsbuFBWqhH1QhKh

Polyrepos are not a requirement for deploying microservices, and if we're goging to discuss failures from an economic perspective, the ROI of LLM use qualifies. As it stands, claims of 'higher productivity' all seem to trace their origins to anecdotes, press releases, and self-reports on surveys.
5 years ago, I would have thought "well, this is just super funny, but it's an exaggeration of course".

But now this just hurts

Microservices are an effective team management strategy in mid-sized legacy and silo’d organizations.

They allow one team to move ahead without requiring group-level collaboration.

For software, they suck, but sometimes it’s the less-bad choice vs never getting anything done.