Comment by cardanome | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cardanome | Hacker News Reader

As someone that had my fair share of experience with mismanaged teams, this rings very true.

For example I had to maintain a legacy PHP project, relatively old school PHP before there was even OO, plain HTML with just a bit of JS sprinkled it. Everyone complained about it and sure the code was horrible but I could dive in and be productive on day one.

Same company, more recent project with a more modern stack, trying to follow all the OO patterns and everything. I was not even able to fix minor bugs in any reasonable time even studying the code for weeks. What happened? While the developers made good technical choices and the quality of the code in isolation was fine, it was horrible mismanaged. There was no continuity, just people working on it for a couple of days then doing something totally different and forgetting everything again on repeat. Individual design decisions were "industry best practice" but the end result was something I wished I could just delete.

Everyone loves to play wiht the newest toys but you got to keep you developer vanity in check. Sometimes the boring CRUD app should use boring technology. With horrible management you will learn to hate what you once loved anyway.

For some reason, web development seems to have an obsession with "progress" and the new-and-shiny-but-objectively-worse. I've noticed that constant reinvention of the wheel and doing the same thing more inefficiently ("but it's more modern!") is a common theme.

When people say a web app is 'modern' I know it involves a javascript framework.

I'm not sure how or why this came about, but it seems to be a code-word meaning one of the newer javascript frameworks, that single word is almost a shibboleth at this point for an entire culture of development.

Not necessarily, it can involve web assembly.

Rails dev. Did a long pair-coding interview at a company that had all JS for their backend. Tried out the JS ORM.

Most of the day was me: let's do <this easy, normal thing in the ORM.> Them: well, this is more like a half-baked rails knockoff so things like that aren't there.

So, they knew it was lousy, but picked it because it was JS? Sigh.

When it comes to pages that would be served just fine with basic HTML, JavaScript and CSS there's an irritating, crossing into stupid, overemphasis on frameworks and patterns. A lot of times it's gotten to the point of bikeshedding.

But that said there _is_ important progress being made in web tech but very little of it has to do with how you mash your HTML, JavaScript and CSS together.

Take a look at what's being done with tech like WebAssembly and full on 3d grpahics in the browser (if youre using a phone I recommend that you connect to a wifi spot to not use up your data).

https://threejs.org/examples/#webgl_animation_keyframes

https://playcanvas.com/

Theres a whole other can of worms to deal with like finding talent (this kind of content is way more labour intensive and requires much stronger domain knowledge). But the point is that there is a path for enhancing online UX and disrupting user expectations. The value add for being able to review 3d models of construction or order previews on demand speaks for itself.

The problem is there are always a couple janky things. This is janky on Chrome. That is janky on Safari. Something else is janky on Edge.

Every framework is about making the janky uniform across operating systems and browsers.

Programmers don't want to have to learn how to anti-jank on 40 different browsers. They want to learn how to anti-jank on 1 framework and get on with life.

Fashion (which values novelty) is a major factor in web design, it stands to reason this preference would spill over to the underlying technical stack as well.

I agree, but this has always stuck out as odd to me. Why is this so true even of the developers in web when people in something like C# are perfectly content using the established tools/frameworks they know year after year? I have seen sometimes seen this in the same person - someone who would never complain about using Entity Framework, but who is always pushing for the latest trend when working in the front end stack.

As someone who has changed the kind of work I do in my career I've had two very different experiences.

There is a web development culture. There was a pace of advancement for many years that helped shape this desire for newest shiniest stuff. Other ingredients such as chasing FAANG, VC money, and the general youth of the average web dev. Salaries chasing talent due to the online boom and corporate policies not adjusting to keep talent, thus needing to do resume building for the next job hop because it's going to happen in less than 2 years.

Even C# isn't completely immune to trendchasing, although you're right that it's less. Maybe it could also be due to how much effort and money is spent promoting novelty --- and certainly for companies like Google, change is their weapon for fighting competition.

Y’know, I’d argue that C# may be the worst when it comes to trend-chasing — for better or for worse, the language’s a giant toy box that lets you develop in very expressive, not to say idiosyncratic, ways.

A decade and a half or so ago, people were mocking FE saying they weren't "real" developers. Well, instead of taking lessons learned from "real" developers in order to catch up/prove wrong/whatever, I think they took the "hold my beer" mentality and it's kinda stuck.

"There was no continuity, just people working on it for a couple of days then doing something totally different and forgetting everything again on repeat."

This is a great description of my current work. Multiple systems, stacks, and technologies to support. It's just constantly jumping from one thing to the other. It gets even worse when you throw PRD support work in there. The context switching is brutal.

I worked at a job once where this was deliberate.

Certain voices in the team were terrified of "siloing", and so it was a matter of policy that everyone had to jump tasks and teams every two weeks, unless they had a solid case for a longer term task.

The result was that no one knew what the hell they were doing, because no one had time to learn anything before they were shuffling chairs again.

We were only saved from this madness when a major data center failure took out the app and all process theatre was temporarily suspended during crisis mode. Once we got back online, it was quickly realized that we'd all been wildly more productive and not just because of the crisis, but because we could actually function organically without the artificial strictures.

I feel like our's is the product of management not wanting to staff up our team or another team to handle different tech (not willing to pay up).

It's possible it's intentional though. It's hard to leave the team or company when you're just ok at a lot of things, but not an expert in anything.

Kind of sounds like a continuity problem, perhaps even a leadership problem.

> Sometimes the boring CRUD app should use boring technology.

Absolutely. I would even say most of the time, CRUD and relational databases can be a much better solution.

What was horrible about it if u were able to be productive in a day?

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