Why is there so much automatic disrespect for companies using older tech?

Epic / Eng
epicwin

Go to company page Epic Eng

 epicwin
Mar 2, 2018 44 Comments

It seems like there are a lot of companies that people won't even consider because they're not using the latest buzzword framework or have legacy code to maintain, but many of those companies are much more mature and have more technical talent than companies that exist to put dog noses on people's faces. (Hint: you don't get to have legacy code unless you're successful in the first place)

For example I get a lot of shit from friends for Epic still using VB6 and M(UMPS) but M is a great language that gets a lot of unjustified hate and Chronicles is an extremely performant and easy-to-use DB that I'd expect to see a decent amount of adoption of if Epic ever open sourced it.

VB6, yeah it's unsupported but it still works after over 20 years and we're already more than 30% done migrating all that code to a modern web stack based on ASP.NET. Let me know if your AngularJS app still works in 5 years.

And despite anyone's complaining about any of this, Epic is still considered the best EMR by pretty much everyone in the industry. We're basically the Microsoft of healthcare. Just shows that you don't have to have tons of buzzwords to have good tech.

Eng
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  • Amazon / Eng
    Hooliganss

    Go to company page Amazon Eng

    BIO
    AWS
     Hooliganss
    I feel like the only people that complain about using old tech are people that know very little outside of their “buzzword framework”.
    Mar 2, 2018 2
  • Comparing Angular to VB is what I’d expect from someone who works with old tech!

    Okay, kidding, but only kind of. There are a few problems with old tech. 1) they’re not delightful to work in. Software engineering done right and with high craftsmanship is hard at the best of times. We enjoy it, but let’s all agree that it’s a challenging discipline that is very easy to get wrong without the benefit of systemic checks and balances. Newer languages often try to make that work more delightful.

    2) support and community is important. VB is fraught with problems, but the biggest one is that it has less support and improvements that a modern, widely used language. This makes it harder to leverage integrations with new systems, or even potentially things like new communication standards and messaging protocols. The smaller the community, the more you have to “roll your own”

    3) a lot of developers nowadays just prefer the *nix environment to the Windows stack for development. Even Powershell is leagues slower for a lot of developers than an OSX terminal. Just windows-specific languages will turn some people off.

    4) the lack of modern paradigms that developers have come to know and live (eg closures) don’t exist in many older languages
    Mar 2, 2018 3
    • Epic / Eng
      epicwin

      Go to company page Epic Eng

       epicwin
      OP
      And yeah you have to write your own stuff in M a lot (our RPCs have a custom over the wire format and we write our own XML parsers where needed) but that's why we're engineers, right?
      Mar 2, 2018
    • I’ll agree and add two more things to @gTqu56’s comment.

      5. Developer efficiency is much higher is most modern languages. There’s a reason that these new languages come up, and granted some of it is like the fashion industry, but there are things like bindings, multithreading, async, etc, that are just easier. Not that they couldn’t be done in older languages, but I’d prefer devs working on business logic than framework code (unless you are a company, like MSFT, that makes a living off that).

      6. Security. Passing text around as code and eval’ing it, writing your own parsers, rolling your own encryption/RBAC/ACLs, sandboxes, and a bunch of other things are all just primed to shoot yourself in the foot.
      Mar 2, 2018
  • Uber
    Fla62i

    Go to company page Uber

    Fla62i
    People hate old tech because if I put VB6 dev on my resume my value goes down. If you want to keep attracting top talent you have to have a reasonably up to date stack.
    Mar 2, 2018 0
  • Amazon / Eng
    8==¶ )

    Go to company page Amazon Eng

     8==¶ )
    What is Epic and are they even a tech company?
    Mar 2, 2018 3
  • Google / Eng
    gQSN44

    Go to company page Google Eng

     gQSN44
    Come on, M and VB6 are both terrible. Epic dominates the EMR market in the US as the best of a bad lot, but the UX is terrible and doctors burn out and spend half the time dealing with the software instead of the patient. It scares me sometimes thinking about the utter lack of basic software engineering practices like unit tests and automated integration tests for the system my health data is flowing through. Please tell me you're not still spending time sending data as delimited strings and parsing them in VB6 instead of just using something like protobufs and codegen. Oh that's right, Epic has not-invented-here-syndrome (emblazoned in the 10 commandments to remind you every time you leave thr bathroom), so god forbid they use anything open source.

    Their campus is nice, salary is good for midwest, and it's a great place to work for a few years out of college, but I'd encourage you to stop buying the company koolaid "we're the Microsoft of the midwest" line and apply to Microsoft, Google, or Amazon if you want to learn why more modern software stacks are worlds better.

    $$zStopKiddingYourself
    Mar 2, 2018 0