Tried telling a new hire our database migration was a bad idea, got sat down by HR

I've been at this company for 6 years. A new team lead rolled in with a plan to move us from PostgreSQL to MongoDB because 'it's what the cool kids use.' I brought up three concrete issues during the meeting: indexing limits, join performance, and our existing reporting tools. Got called into HR the next day for 'creating a negative environment.' They went ahead with the migration anyway. Six months later the reporting dashboard takes 45 seconds to load instead of 2. Anyone else have a manager who treats tech decisions like a popularity contest?

2 comments

2 Comments

blake_smith3d ago

Hold up, 45 seconds for a dashboard sounds like a win to me honestly. That gives you time to grab coffee and actually think about what you're looking at instead of rushing through data like some kind of speed demon. Plus MongoDB is way better for scaling when you eventually hit a million users or whatever, your old Postgres setup would have choked way harder.

jana_hernandez3d ago

Blake you're not wrong about MongoDB scaling in some ways but 45 seconds for a dashboard is actually brutal when you're trying to make quick decisions. Postgres handles reporting joins way better for structured data like dashboards, so the real issue here is picking a tool for hype instead of the actual workload. End of the day, a database is just a tool, not a personality trait.

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