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Comment by GVIrish | Hacker News Reader

> This may be a mean thing to say, but basically I think SPA's are massively overused, because developers want to demonstrate that they can do them.

Unfortunately this is another side effect of the broken hiring process in IT. Recruiters are scanning resumes for the hottest buzzwords, hiring managers want people who have experience with whatever is currently hyped, so developers naturally steer towards those technologies.

So a developer may even be aware it doesn't quite make sense to use a single page architecture, but they know that if they have it on their resume it'll help them make more money at the next job.

It's a whole maladaptive signaling phenomenon that arises out of organizations overvaluing the wrong things in hiring.

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I agree. It's also not simply a matter of making more money on the next job, it can be a matter of having a next job.

Some years ago, 3 of us picked React for a startup. I consider it the single biggest mistake in my career, but we picked it not for the reason you mention. We didn't think that far (I was perhaps a junior, but the others weren't). It was just a matter of picking the frontend framework that we liked the best (I think the options were between Backbone, Ember, AngularJS, React). In our minds we did pick the simple option.

Some may be aware, but certainly not everyone.

> I consider it the single biggest mistake in my career

I have to ask... what went so wrong? If you had a time machine, what would you tell your younger self?

Oh I'm so sorry, I didn't see the replies.

It was a mistake because we needed to move fast and figure out if we had something or not. A simple CRUD website (say Ruby on Rails, Elixir/Phoenix, or even straight up Node/Express) would have been faster to build and iterate on.

There was one section of it that would benefit from being able to work while offline, so that could perhaps have been built as a small SPA. But the rest, that was in hindsight a mistake.

If you had to redo what would you pick? Why not jQuery?

jQuery would have been fine, but honestly the website did not need that much js (if any). It should just have been a CRUD website.

100% correct, and I'm guilty as charged. If leadership likes the sound of SPAs, and my next job wants me to have experience with SPAs, I'm using SPAs.

It can be the same story on the hiring side: Teams will decide to build $new_thing using $NEW_THING! simply because they know it will help them attract more (and often less expensive) applicants.

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