Doing microservices from the start is fine if you know what to expect. Having worked with massive monoliths, there are cons that people don't consider longer-term and the longer you dig yourself in the harder it is to pull yourself out.
Honestly I think the realistic advice should be to go monolith if you or part of your team aren't experienced with microservices or if your app is simple / you'd be overengineering it otherwise.
If you're starting a SaaS company, you can envision the moving pieces, and will be growing your team quickly microservices properly in the beginning can have a lot of benefits.
Just feels like another one of those dogmas people just mindlessly scream on the internet all day without considering all the cost/benefit analysis for each particular case.
> Whatever the grand strategy for success is, it gets broken down into lots of smaller tasks. When you hit a wall on one task, you could say “that’s it, I’m done for the day” and head home, or you could switch over to something else that has a different rhythm and get more accomplished. Even when you are clearly not at your peak, there is always plenty to do that doesn’t require your best, and it would actually be a waste to spend your best time on it. You can also “go to the gym” for your work by studying, exploring, and experimenting, spending more hours in service to the goal.
Absolutely true.
> I think most people excited by these articles are confusing not being aligned with their job’s goals with questions of effectiveness. If you don’t want to work, and don’t really care about your work, less hours for the same pay sounds great! If you personally care about what you are doing, you don’t stop at 40 hours a week because you think it is optimal for the work, but rather because you are balancing it against something else that you find equally important. Which is fine.
And this is really the key to the whole shorter work week argument. I agree with John; if you are running your own company or initiative in an area you are passionate about, the 40 hour week question probably doesn't even dawn on you. Why would you want to work less to achieve a goal you are ambitious to reach? If anything you are working more because you enjoy it and want to see more progress more quickly.
But most people working a typical job (even in tech) are not in a position to care deeply about their work and its outcomes - why that's the case is a separate discussion and probably differs person-to-person. A good amount of those people might even be working on things during those 40 hours that are a poor use of their individual time due to bad management, bureaucracy, inability to work on things they want to, etc. These people are not able to work 40+ hours things that feel or are as important as other things in their life such as side projects, family, exercise, etc. And so the 5 day, 40 hour workweek feels incompatible with their life.
People are treating this as if this is the Reddit of 2011. If you really think this protest is going to stop the momentum of a Reddit IPO payout you are sorely mistaken.
There are a few "hardcore" staff/prinicpal engineers at my company (a well known tech unicorn). They are basically OGs who were a big part of the company's early success. Really smart and saavy guys who are left alone to focus on executing on big stuff.
The reality for other staff engineers here is exactly opposite though - you're not allowed to just be "executing" and your day consists of being stuck in meetings, doc writing, and management-lite. Honestly it's so bureaucratic and so far removed from the actual tech I really got turned off from that career path as I got more visibility into it.
For smaller companies it's probably much more fulfilling though.