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Comment by wwweston | Hacker News Reader

If you think resume-driven development is bad for developers (and it is), consider the career incentives for UI and product people. If there's a "maintain" incentive, I'm not sure what it is. "Didn't change anything about functional and satisfactory interfaces" may be a real value-add in some cases, but it's not a sizzling narrative for selling yourself on the job market.

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With apologies to Warren G. Bennis:

The UI/UX department of the future will have only two employees, a hipster and a dog. The hipster will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to bite the hipster if they change the UI/UX.

I think this reads better if the dog's job is "to bite the hipster if they change the UI/UX", but yes.

Suggestion accepted! Changed!

(Bite me.)

Sorry but now I must know what the original version was!

Closer to Bennis's original: "The dog will be there to keep the hipster from touching the UI/UX".

I think a lot of companies have too many designers with not much to do. Google has a team of people responsible for changing up the art or making whimsical games on the home page every day.

I also read 10 years ago that Amazon hired a big name to take over design for the shopping portal and Bezos wouldn't let this person do much of anything.

Too true. As an Amazon user for 22 years now, I was amazed by the greater than decade run some of their pages had with the UX appearing nearly unchanged (e.g. login flow).

Very true. Most people get measured by how much churn they create. The more the better. Even if it’s 100% correct for the business you are digging your own grave if you leave things the way they are.

I met these two mobile devs at a conference.

They survived several rounds of cost-cutting at a large company by constantly convincing management to let them rewrite their mobile app in some new framework because of X.

Start out with the native implementations, then they did Xamarin, tried PhoneGap, went back to native, then to React Native, and now on to Flutter. The pair of them keep their jobs constantly rewriting an app.

Now and then frameworks does backwards incompatible changes so you might as well rewrite the app. If you continue with the old version of the framework you are stuck with either security holes, bugs or that google and apple changes something that downprioritize your app into oblivion.

And if the UI/UX does not significantly change every 6 months, your users will give you one star reviews and "Old looking and ugly" comments. I don't envy app developers.

Yea if a framework makes breaking changes to the point where you can't upgrade your app, that seems like it could be a recurring problem so after the first rewrite you might as well learn native code and write it there.

This is a lesson that consistently gets lost in the salivation over the latest SPA framework sexiness.

Disagreed, the vast majority of business problems with tech are solved with some form of CRUD which frameworks are perfect for. If your framework all of a sudden doesn't support your business needs either you didn't plan ahead well or your business simply outgrew it, which can happen once a business becomes complex enough.

Virtually nobody in software is incentivized to look at long term software costs. Startups need to move fast, project managers move on, devs need to keep their skills up to date to keep flipping jobs, and managers would need to become technical.

Most, not all; if you have the right skills, you can find a comfortable job maintaining legacy code and (actually) improving it. Then again, most developers seem more interested in chasing new and shiny rather than polishing a stable system.

" comfortable job maintaining legacy code "

That's a very dangerous career path though. If that legacy system gets replaced you are usually out of a job and job search is hard with outdated skills.

To give you an idea of how reluctant they are to replace things, some equipment in the manufacturing industry is over a century old and still in continuous use. They will certainly be extremely unwilling to get on the "upgrade treadmill" that seems to be getting faster these days.

Also, problem solving and creative thinking are never outdated skills. ;-)

guide me brother how to get into this?

Apply to big non tech companies who probably run on older tech

This comment needs more upvotes. It's endemic to the software industry and far beyond. From employees who need to meet some arbitrary (and possibly unwritten) metric, to executives who are compelled to leave their mark on anything they touch, the number of people-years we waste on unnecessary churn has got to be staggering.

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