I feel like we're headed in a direction where serverless means "removing things developers have to deal with" when it should be "removing things the business as a whole has to deal with", and we're losing the recognition those are often not well-aligned.
In the early days serverless presented as an opportunity to build differently to get a lower TCO. Now there's a lot of focus on *not* building differently and very little mention of TCO.
there is a lot of effort towards "just write code", as if custom code should remain the central purpose of a developer
@ben11kehoe I've got some unpublished writing on the misconception that proprietary code is an asset.
Everyone wants to be a tech company, because they get sweet market multiples in recent history, and they think they need expensive engineers writing proprietary code to achieve this.
I think there are really two types of tech company: pure tech and tech-enabled. Pure tech companies sell tech products or leverage proprietary tech to do something fundamentally different than their competitors. Tech-enabled companies use technology in existing markets to provide the same service, but better. For tech enabled companies, code should be seen as a liability.
We need software people in tech-enabled companies, but we need to reconceptualize the role to glorify high velocity, low TCO solutions over delivering new bespoke systems as the solution to every problem.
@acjay Strongly agree, I actually used to say that iRobot is not a cloud software company, it's a cloud-enabled-features company.