How to convince management to change the development platform of the project, completely rewriting it?

Question

ruby

Hello!
I am addressing a question that worries me very much, which, it would seem, cannot be discussed and needs to be resolved as soon as possible, but the management rested its horn and does not want to listen to any arguments, answering me that the proposed platform is not modern and in a couple of years everyone will forget about it (this is not joke).
The point is that our project uses Ruby and everything would be fine, but the lead programmer ignores a lot of the tasks assigned, or does not cope with them, and the management is not ready for big expenses to hire highly qualified professionals in this field who could better cope with our tasks. tasks, because The entire IT department works remotely. Accordingly, a Ruby project is extremely expensive to support, and instead of moving forward, we have been marking time for half a year, blocking the same bugs...
I want to audit the entire project in order to give it for execution to one familiar PHP programmer who has experience in serious development of high-load services, his own framework based on the Zend Framework and all of his projects that I have seen (one of which is the winner of the Runet award in one of the nominations) are made from the needle. we are currently suffering a big loss in sales due to the unintelligible work of our service.
Please help, I don't know how else to influence the management, which is deeply disappointed in general in the entire IT field and does not believe in anything. I apologize for being too emotional, but it boiled up so much that I'm ready to invest my money in the development of a hundred thousand with a salary of 30k :(

Answer 1

I think management is right, but you are not.
Getting attached to one person with a self-made great is at least stupid.
If you are not qualified to refactor the project, then it is worth hiring someone who can.

Answer 2

I think this is a very bad idea: why do you think a PHP programmer would be more motivated?
It seems to me that the problem is not in the programmer, but in the person responsible for the project, who does not know how to select personnel and change them in time .
And, may I ask, how much do you pay specialists? Per hour of work.
Upd : the problem is clear. The main developer works at a quarter rate.

Answer 3

familiar diagnosis.
In recent years, I have been engaged in just consulting, on the topic of how best and more efficiently to organize such work processes.
I will say right away - it is unlikely that you will achieve something:
1) You do not have a strong argument.
2) A strong argument for business is the speed of getting an acceptable profit.
3) As a matter of fact - you rest against a platform. I am a programmer, believe me, you raised a question from the category of a holivar. I saw equally successful projects on different platforms, and some programmers learned from scratch.
4) To be honest, it's too late to decide the issue of changing the platform - you will spend a lot of money on changing and rebuilding the work.
And most importantly, when it was necessary to solve this problem:
1) At the very beginning.
2) Do not attract a herd of freelancers
3) It is better to bring 2-3 programmers to the office for a salary + so that among them there is one of the most experienced - he is also a director. In this vein, no matter what platform - everyone wins in terms of money, in terms of time and, most importantly, in terms of payback periods. + You will always have developers at hand who will be able to finish projects. My practice shows that, usually, such a configuration works more efficiently than 5-6 freelancers and one programmer in the enterprise, who brings it all into one.
Here at the initial stage, it is better to bend this option, with financial layouts.

Answer 4

You will not be able to convince the management that you need to change the platform or it will be "mission impossible". If such badyaga is going on, force the developer to write tests for all bugs.
If this is a browser service, use selenium, control the success of the passage and whether the tests are indicative. Make a CI system (Jenkins as an example) and it turns out that the platform will be the same, the number of bugs will decrease, but as the tests are covered.

Answer 5

There is no point in rewriting. It makes sense to write new system components in a new language, but existing ones do not. And it doesn't fit in my head, how can a PHP programmer be more productive than a Ruby programmer? Ruby has a lot of goodies for very fast development. Do you have Rails or what?

Answer 6

I got the impression after reading the comments that the company has little money now, the management is clamped down. So why now change the platform, rewrite the project virtually from scratch, if this will lead to even greater costs? Well, let's say you decide to rewrite. What is the estimate of the complexity of the task in terms of time? Will there be more tests written? Do they exist now? If there are no tests, then at a certain level of complexity of the project, slippage is inevitable. Changing the code will lead to unpredictable consequences in the behavior of the application.
As already noted, it is necessary to either spur the developer's motivation, or change it. By the way, a salary of $ 1000 for a good developer is not money worth straining for. Surely there are other projects and he prioritizes the one that pays more or is more interesting.

Answer 7

Maybe change the lead programmer?

Answer 8

Make not a technical, but a financial layout. In the spirit: we need feature X, it will give Y money of income. If we work with Vasya, then we need Z money to make feature X, and if we start working with Petya, we will give W money. There is a chance to convince if:
Y>Z>W.
But I strongly doubt that Z>W. Not to mention the fact that the question immediately arises, who will answer with a loot if you are convinced to succeed, but in fact the ratio Y>Z>W will not be observed.

Answer 9

that I am ready to invest my money in the development of a hundred thousand with a salary of 30k :(

Desire talking about kickbacks, huh? ;)
Because in my life I will not believe that an employee will give the office 100 krub of his hard-earned savings (because with a salary of 30 krub it can only be savings, PS money taken on credit is also savings).

Answer 10

From the side it looks like a change of horse at the crossing.
Completely rewriting the project is not the fastest solution to the problem. First you need to restore the trust of the leadership. To do this, find bottlenecks and solve them in the simplest way. It is difficult to say what kind of solution it will be, but it should range from buying (renting) additional hardware to rewriting or refining individual subsystems (if possible). Many performance problems (if obscure work is associated with it) can be solved with good database optimization, hire a cool database specialist for a couple of weeks.
Until management trusts you, you won't be able to convince them of anything. For management, going into a rewrite from scratch now looks like shelving a decision.

Answer 11

Greetings!
Which php tutorial to choose?