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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

I dont want to name names, but do any tech company actually apologise after their high evangelism to the world and industry and walk back 70% of their decision five years later?

And for some strange reason this mostly happens to Web Development in general.

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1. Create and evangelize over-engineered solution (React, Kubernetes...)

2. Watch potential competitors chase their tails & burn budgets adopting hot new thing

3. Quietly drop or sideline solution a few years later

Why would they? They weren’t responsible. The people who championed these approaches have left for new jobs.

I've seen that a few times now, really intelligent people over-engineering and selling a new system, moving up in the company then out. They sell technology that doesn't age well, get a fat paycheck, and never have to live with the consequences. I'm kinda done with that.

Mind you, sometimes it's inadvertent. I'm currently the only web developer at my company building a big system in Go and React. I don't believe they are very difficult or esoteric technologies, but I'm still not sure if they will be able to find a replacement if I decided to move on.

But I don't know what the alternative would have been. Probably keep trudging on with the old PHP + Dojo bombsite, but it would have the same problem because who would want to work with that tech stack? Who would be able to be productive in a 200K LOC pile of shit? I mean even if it wasn't shit, it's still 200K LOC representing a decade of work, dozens of domains and hundreds / thousands of individual features.

Which is where technology choices come in again; use simple and few tools, the problem to be solved is difficult enough already.

They will keep spitting out frontend frameworks that push computation out to the consumer. It’s probably cheaper to develop new frontend frameworks than it is to pay for server side rendering.

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