The kind of conversation that makes me love what I do.

We are Java shop, and we use Lightbend Lagom Framework. Based on this context, I asked today:

Am I not still be allowed to create a new service in Scala?

Roberto (@RobbieTweetsJr) gets back to me:

You can do whatever you want. Whether it gets approved is out of my hands. :joy:

…. Roberto is typing for long long time so I close Slack until I get notified….

It has nothing to do with complicated or easy. No one’s going to argue that it’s not simpler to do it in Scala, but in a project this size, it’s not that simple. It’s easy for you because you’ve got the knowledge. But there are at least 40 other Java developers on this project, not all of which have Scala experience. This is not your traditional software development company.

I said:

Let’s teach them.

Roberto, very polite says back:

Now you’re asking a project of 800+ people to slow down in arguably the most important layer because we want everyone to learn so that we can make things easier. I would say “Make everyone read at home.” But virtually no one here goes home to continue learning. Something they’ll pay for eventually, but I can’t speed that up as much as I would like to.

I typed again:

Let’s just do it and learn as we go.

Roberto thinks… I wait… he typed:

That’s not going to fly because you’re going to get people fired after things have slowed down, or issues have come up because you’re not going to rewrite 100+ services in Scala by yourself and you’re not going to support 100+ services in Scala no matter what you say and be able to ensure utmost quality.

There are deadlines that are arguably arbitrary but that we have to meet within some reasonable target. We can’t do that in the middle of a go-live quarter and ask to push back deadlines because “We want to try something new.”

At the end of the day, objectively speaking, this is the best course of action for the company at the moment. You wouldn’t like it if there was a super doctor at one hospital pushing his other doctor colleagues to perform their usual operations in a different way without the proper training. You definitely wouldn’t like it if you got one of the untrained doctors to operate on of your loved ones just to see if they can do it better.

We have to wait. That’s my plan. This is eventually going to slow down and then changes can be made and suggested. In the meantime, I’m observing and from that group of 40 developers, I’m observing the best ones, the ones that care and put in more effort than what’s required.

Those are the ones that can go and rewrite related services in one shot and provide reasonable support. Eventually, we can make a change. It’s not tomorrow, but it’s not next year.

I finished saying:

That is understandable, I don’t want to get people fired. We should wait.

The kind of conversation that makes me love what I do. was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.