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Ask HN: Is it expected of a new CTO to redefine the development stack?

by zeeone on 9/8/20, 8:08 PM with 3 comments

The company hired a new CTO. He's taken it upon himself to set the development stack for both back and front end development. Our application is migrating to micro services. Is it normal for a CTO to set a single technology to be used in all services?

  • by KingOfCoders on 9/9/20, 3:22 AM

    Rewrites are dangerous for companies. They cost time and their benefit is small at best, often they leave the system in a worse state, see "Things You Should Never Do, Part I" [1]. As a CEO I would be very suspicious if a CTO rewrites the stack.

    That said I did come into companies as CTO where I should have started a rewrite. The code plainly was not able to scale the way it was written. We had lots of trouble with scaling and I struggled balacing feature pressure and technical rewrites of parts of the code base in order to scale. Getting in and start with rewriting the code base for 6 months so it would scale would have made things much easier for all developers.

    As a CTO coach this is also what I tell my coachees now :-)

    [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

  • by __d on 9/8/20, 8:40 PM

    It depends.

    A CTO is responsible for ensuring that the company is able to deliver what’s needed, and if the current stack has issues, including ok-now-but-won’t-scale issues, then they should switch it out for one that positions the company for success.

    OTOH, it could be motivated by a range of unjustifiable things: personal familiarity, resume building, blind trend following, asserting of authority, etc.

    In most cases, the engineering staff can tell whether the motivation is good or not.

  • by exolymph on 9/8/20, 8:15 PM

    It's an example of a larger pattern, which is that new execs like to shake things up. There are charitable and uncharitable explanations of why, but really it varies by individual.