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A comment on The Death of Microservice Madness in 2018. Parent comment

Re:The Death of Microservice Madness in 2018 by simias on Monday January 22, 2018 @04:20AM (#16203046)
The #1 thing they should teach in any engineering school (or maybe any school period) is "you shouldn't remove/replace/change something until you've understood why it was done that way in the first place". Or maybe a somewhat equivalent version: "you're not as clever as you think you are and the people who came before you were not as dumb as you think they were".
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Re:The Death of Microservice Madness in 2018 by dancek on Monday January 22, 2018 @05:26AM (#16203330)
This principle is commonly known as Chesterton's fence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence
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Re:The Death of Microservice Madness in 2018 by ZeroGravitas on Monday January 22, 2018 @04:47AM (#16203168)
Would those graduates be rewarded or penalised for their professionalism? I would guess penalised in a depressing number of situations.
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Re:The Death of Microservice Madness in 2018 by stult on Monday January 22, 2018 @07:12AM (#16203788)
>"you shouldn't remove/replace/change something until you've understood why it was done that way in the first place".

That only works until you encounter something for which there was no rational reason in the first place.

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Re:The Death of Microservice Madness in 2018 by artimaeis on Monday January 22, 2018 @09:37AM (#16204612)
I've yet to encounter anything erected for no reason at all. But there are plenty of projects where rationality didn't have much a role in their choice of creation. Examples like that can usually be tied to a previous dev/engineer wanting to pad their resume with a new project, maybe with a new framework. Or a manager who wanted their team to have more completed work to look better on some miscalculated performance metric. Failing those options - it could be a bored employee who just wanted to make _something_.

That is to say - most people are acting rationally, but their context to an outsider may not appear rational. Maybe there's something to be said for a general relativity of rationality?

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