My Yankee vs Giant Thing
Thinking about Yankees and Giants always throws me back. Not to baseball, funny enough, but to this project I got tangled up in a while back. It was one of those situations, you know?
So, we had these two big pieces of software inside the company. One was ancient, been around forever, rock solid mostly but a real pain to update. Let’s call it the ‘Yankee’. Everyone knew it, trusted it kinda, but groaned when they had to touch it. Then there was the newer one, the ‘Giant’. It looked slicker, promised the world, faster they said. But man, it would just fall over sometimes. Unpredictable.
My job? Figure out what the heck we were gonna do. Stick with old reliable Yankee? Go all in on the flashy Giant? Try and make them work together? Nightmare.
Here’s what I actually did, step by step:
- First, I just spent days, maybe weeks, buried in documentation for both. Trying to get my head around how they ticked.
- Then, I started talking to people. Sat down with the guys who basically grew up with the Yankee system. Real old school types.
- Next, went over to the Giant team. Younger crowd, super enthusiastic, convinced their way was the only way forward.
- I actually tried building a small test feature on both systems. Just to see what it felt like, you know? Get my hands dirty.
- Made charts. So many charts. Pros, cons, costs, time estimates. My whiteboard looked like a crazy person owned it.
The Big Showdown
Getting the data was one thing. Getting people to agree? Whole different ballgame. The meetings were something else. You had the Yankee loyalists pointing out every single time Giant crashed. You had the Giant team showing fancy demos and talking about future-proofing. It got heated. People were really dug in, defending their system like it was their favorite team.
Honestly, it felt less about the tech sometimes and more about… well, pride? Sticking to what you know versus taking a chance. Politics, basically.
And the result after all that? After all my digging and chart-making and trying to get folks to see reason?
Nothing. Yep, seriously. Management couldn’t make the tough call. They got spooked by the potential disruption of switching fully to Giant, but also didn’t want to invest more in the old Yankee. So, the official decision was… keep both running. Keep patching Yankee, keep trying to stabilize Giant. The worst possible outcome, really. More work for everyone, no clear path forward.
So yeah. Yankees Giants. For me, it’s a reminder of that mess. Taught me a lot about how decisions get made, or don’t get made, in big places. Sometimes the logical choice just gets lost in the noise. It’s just people, you know?
