I’ve been a software developer pretty much my entire career. I know how important it is for developers to use the latest trends, let it be frameworks, languages, IDEs, cloud services, libraries, or third-party services.
Almost every week I have somebody from the engineering team coming up to me with a question (that sometimes sounds more like a request) about whether we are going to migrate one of the apps from our portfolio to a new framework. Because it is the future and everybody is talking about it. It could be an almost legitimate question and they’ve spent 4-5 hours over the weekend and their “hello-world” app was super slick, fast, and secure. So, obviously, it is a good-enough reason to migrate the platform we’ve been developing for the past 5 years to this new fancy framework.
I interview on average 5 engineers every week. Every single one of them is saying that it is one of the most important factors for them in choosing the company – you have to use the latest tech.
So how do you deal with the urge for the latest tech, and how do you keep up?
After several years in management, I’ve developed a couple of recipes that can give you some peace of mind while keeping your door open and your engineering team engaged, empowered, and motivated.
Recipe 1 – do it, with constraints
Sometimes you just need to redesign, refactor, or migrate. When? Well, if your gut feeling tells you “You are using some very obsolete tech”, this is already a good sign. If when you post a job ad for a development position and specify the tech stack you use and you get close to zero decent responses in one week. Then something is definitely off.
You can also do an anonymous survey with your engineering team and ask them whether they are excited about the tech stack used. You’ll probably get some obvious answers. Unless your whole engineering team consists of 55+ years old who worked their entire life in the same company.
It’s never an easy task to migrate some legacy system into something modern without freezing business features development for a substantial time. There are multiple approaches there, and I’ll probably dedicate a whole separate post to it at a later stage. But my initial advice would be to always try a migration of some subset of the platform. Extract some functionality into a new micro-service. Something a small team can knock off within a week or two maximum. Make all necessary adjustment in the current system to utilise a new service. And then share the outcomes with your entire tech team and start planning bit by bit for the rest of the platform.
It will take time, and you might end up building new functionality you will be rewriting at a later stage. But it’ll enable your team to work on new cool stuff, and they’ll have a clear picture of how the whole platform will be migrated over time.
Recipe 2 – sure, tell us why and how
This one is my favourite for so many occasions. With whatever request you get, for a new language, or a tool (like an IDE) – just say “Yes, sure, sounds good”. And then ask the developer who raised the request to prep a presentation at their own expense (since this is important to them) for the whole engineering team. In this presentation he/she would have to give an intro to the language or the tool, explain why it is better in their eyes. And also show a working example where some complex part of your current system is implemented using the new language/framework etc.
In 90% of the cases, it’ll go nowhere. Unfortunately, in most cases, people just through in an idea, but they don’t want to do a single thing about it themselves. Somebody else needs to sell it for them, do all the planning, and pay for all the attempts. When it becomes their responsibility, all of a sudden, your current choice for the language is fine, and the new one doesn’t have that advanced documentation, and tons of super handy libraries, and it’s tricky to figure out how to do everything. And sometimes they just cannot answer a simple question “Why?”. Why is this new framework better than the current one? Just because it’s been a buzz-word for the past week?
When you get that other 10 % and they went that extra mile and they are confident about the outcomes, they presented their case and made everybody excited. This is great. Then it is your time to do your part and work with your business stakeholders, explaining the need for some extra investment, planning accordingly and getting the whole thing moving. This is why you are the leader. You need to listen to your team and move the mountains for them. So do you magic and be great.
And if you need help or advice please feel free to give me a shout.