Hacker News Reader

Comment by corrral | Hacker News Reader

It's bizarre to me that smallish teams in the 90s were able to make native "apps"—sometimes even multi-platform—for markets so tiny that they'd be considered beneath notice now, but huge companies today only seem to be able to produce fragile low-quality resource-eating webtech shitware, with much larger teams. WTF happened?

View on HN

$$$$

Companies realized that they could save money by using mediocre coders to create MVP products using things like Chromium and then, instead of refining those products, they scale them up massively (which the MVPs were never intended for).

Management wants you to make a cross platform app, but with the minimum "cost". Who is going to spend all that time making 5 good apps when you can make 1 shitty one instead? I guess what actually happened is cross platform tech advanced, but this ease of development has actually worsened the user experience.

This might not be entirely related but something I've noticed is that whenever you see the promotional material for a modern UI toolkit you will find that it's marketed for ease of use for developers rather than making easy to use applications for users.

This is a developer culture problem as much as it is a technology problem. Developers (and their bosses) care less and less every year about runtime performance, stability, quality and so on. Management just figures it's easier to find a truck full of JavaScript developers than it is to find two good C++ developers, so everyone just agrees to choose technologies that are popular and trade off end user's needs for developer speed and comfort. The industry has sacrificed so much at the altar of "developer convenience".

But that’s just it. Markets are huge now. You have to be fast to market to grab a big chunk and dominate. No company who has Teams will use Zoom, and equally shitty product that was also rushed. If you have O365, you probably won’t use slack, Microsoft wins.

was at a big corp, you could be contacted over teams, skype, slack, or email, with meetings in teams or zoom.

As the saying goes, two programmers can always create in two months what one programmer can create in one week.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com