Is adding more languages to your tech stack costing you money?


Sometimes it is tough to switch from wearing your engineering hat to wearing your business hat. It’s something I have to do all the time to ensure my clients are getting the biggest return on investment into their team and tech stack.

Let's say you built your application using Python and you have built up a small but dedicated team of developers that can hammer out code at an accelerated pace. You have developed a process for finding and assessing the skill level of new hires.

Every few months to a year a new version of Django or your framework of choice comes out and your team needs to update that. Every now and then you need to update the Dockerfiles to keep it up to date as well.

All is well but then a shiny new language comes across the headlines. It boasts it is the latest and greatest language with all the bells and whistles. For this example lets say it is Rust.

Do you throw away your old code and pray you can retrain all your devs for the new language so they can rewrite everything? You could but that would be an epic endeavor.

Perhaps, instead you just build one lone microservice in Rust? Great! But, assuming you didn’t go with option 1 where you rewrite everything and ditch your old stack you now have 2 coding standards you need to maintain. 2 sets of docker images. 2 languages you now need to be proficient in hiring and assessing the skill levels of.

The amount of hours to do all these tasks quickly adds up. Those are all hours your team is doing double maintenance instead of focusing on building those features that will get you to the next level.

If you are considering adding the shiny new tech to your stack just take a second to stop and do the math with your business hat on to see if it is a good decision or will your team spend more time maintaining the shiny new tech then it provides in value.

Right now, I am on an ROI kick designing systems to help my clients get $10 in value for every $1 they hand me so this and other ways of making sure the technical side of your business is getting the best ROI will be the topic of tomorrow’s podcast/livestream, feel free to join us.