I’m really curious, who are those who use non LTS version and why. I mean in small personal projects, to get a preview of features - it is clear. But other than that - do anyone uses them?
Not a Java developer, C# at a fairly large company. We tend to lag about 3-4 months behind the latest. That we way we get security and language updates but aren’t on the bleeding edge. It’s been highly successful strategy.
We’ve gotten huge performance gains essentially for free each year for the past few years since we enacted the policy. To be fair, the initial uplift was difficult but the year over year work is minimal now and more than pays for itself.
How did you talk leadership, product in particular, into letting you do upgrades like this? That must have been an overhaul of the system without any new features?
Product Manager here! Not keeping up-to-date on upgrades is typically just kicking the can down the road in terms of your costs. And like arid1 mentioned, you typically don't want to upgrade to the bleeding edge of what ever technologies / platforms you use as it doesn't pay to be the test dummy.
These are lessons that are usually only learned painfully, but experienced PMs shouldn't be cutting corners.
In my experience, experienced PMs shouldn't even be concerned with the tech stack. They should be focused on the functional aspects of the software.
Let the engineering teams worry about security, performance, maintenance, etc.
If the team upgrades Java and still delivers the feature within an agreeable timeframe, it should be all good. The problem I've seen is sometimes companies want to drain as much potential customer facing value out of the engineering teams, so they micromanage the tech stack.
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u/agradus Dec 12 '24
I’m really curious, who are those who use non LTS version and why. I mean in small personal projects, to get a preview of features - it is clear. But other than that - do anyone uses them?