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

2 points by zeeone 5 years ago | 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?

KingOfCoders 5 years ago |

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-...

__d 5 years ago |

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.

exolymph 5 years ago |

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.