Re:Uber Engineering Tricks of the Trade: Tuning JVM Memory f...
by 0xbadcafebee on Tuesday May 18, 2021 @07:52PM
(#27202849)
Large companies operate almost entirely on legacy inefficient crap. It's often the case that the thing that makes them the most money is running on giant old barely-supported piles of shit.
People constantly underestimate the fact that >80% of the cost of software is maintenance. Upgrades and patches and redesigns/refactors and following modern conventions costs 4x more than the cost it took to build it. But nobody puts that in their budget. And then later people find this huge pile of legacy shit, and think, wow, this company really screwed up. But in fact this is totally normal.
By the way, this is the case because of how we develop software and hardware, not because they are some inscrutable element that can't possibly be built once and maintained for a lifetime (like, say, a building). We just don't build it to last.
People constantly underestimate the fact that >80% of the cost of software is maintenance. Upgrades and patches and redesigns/refactors and following modern conventions costs 4x more than the cost it took to build it. But nobody puts that in their budget. And then later people find this huge pile of legacy shit, and think, wow, this company really screwed up. But in fact this is totally normal.
By the way, this is the case because of how we develop software and hardware, not because they are some inscrutable element that can't possibly be built once and maintained for a lifetime (like, say, a building). We just don't build it to last.