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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I’m profoundly disappointed in the direction computing has gone in the last decade. It’s like Idiocracy actually happened and we’re living in that timeline. Desktop software is trash. Apps that worked perfectly well a decade ago on far slower computers run like ass on far faster computers. The new Mac Outlook sucks CPU just sitting there doing nothing. The new Acrobat is so bad I’ve gone back to emacs for reading and annotating PDFs. To be clear, viewing PDFs in Emacs is a total hack. It involves rendering each page to a PNG file in a separate process, and having Emacs display the PNG. And it still causes the fans on my laptop to spin up less than Acrobat. And don’t even get me started on all the pdf.js/Electron stuff.

What on earth is going on in the computing industry? Did all the smart nerds get siphoned off to hedge funds and machine learning, so Microsoft and Google can only hire the dregs to write boring desktop software?

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I started in the industry in the 90s. Back then most devs were actually interested in computing and motivated to learn. And management was pretty loose. In my first job they basically told "Here is the problem. Come back in a few months.". No standups, no backlog. But I sat in a nice office with two other guys where we could talk about the problems.

Nowadays I feel there are a lot of people who got into computing as a career but don't really care. And management is trying to convert software development into a micromanaged sweatshop with easily replaceable people.

Software development has become so ubiquitous and lucrative that it attracts folks who are heavily motivated to find some reason to exist in the org structure, regardless of whether or not that's good for the product.

The number of TPMs and co-PMs (both Product and Project varietals) has exploded. There are now "group program managers" and of course all of these no-hard-product-artifact roles have formed hierarchies, so it's now possible to be a senior technical program manager managing other technical program mangers, the real work-product of which is purely additional meetings. Sub-par software engineers now have tons of places in the org structure where they can move laterally to maintain a place in tech - usually by inserting themselves between technical groups.

Thus, the ratio of people-who-can-produce-something-in-the-product to people-who-mostly-use-email-jira-slack-and-${videoconf} has plummeted.

Any non-trivial engineering product requires organizational members, but there's administrative bloat in tech to rival academia.

I suspect that many of the egregiously bad examples here are, rather than the product of a small team of terrible engineers, actually the product of several large teams of engineers being mediated by pseudo-technical people lodged in bureaucratic seams. That's how the worst software I've personally seen has been produced.

> What on earth is going on in the computing industry? Did all the smart nerds get siphoned off to hedge funds and machine learning, so Microsoft and Google can only hire the dregs to write boring desktop software?

They’re grinding leetcode and getting a new job every ~1.5 years.

What happens when owning a home and starting a family near your employer is hard and gaming the interview process is easy.

I was kinda shocked to learn the turnover at tech companies. Though I hardly think it’s just the Bay Area. From what I learnt the avg tenure is 4+ years nationally and about 1.5 for the likes of Google, Microsoft, Snapchat, Meta, …etc. These companies all pay well. I’ve stayed at companies for longer and for much lesser than that.

While I don’t think company loyalty is warranted, I can’t understand why there aren’t much efforts to retain them. Like matching your current employees with market rather than letting them feel like they have to job hop for a better pay.

The answer to this question is not politically correct, and therefore will not be answered. We will all end up with quantum computers and software that runs slower than any software from the late 90/2000s

It comes down to difficulties of getting a team together that can implement cross-platform software. Shipping native implementations is more than quadruple the work and cost as compared to shipping with Electron, which is reliably cross-platform and doesn't need you to gather programmers who can pull off native work, not to mention the complications in communication and management that arise after headcount of a group gets larger. There are now alternatives to Electron (Tauri/Rust and Wails/Go) and some Electron projects are starting to transfer over (like 1Password -- you can really feel difference) but it'll take time for the ecosystem to mature and become more attractive than Electron for the average project.

But right now, Electron remains a solid choice if you want to ship cross-platform desktop software without overextending on budget and time. Moreover, it's possible to make Electron apps that aren't terrible if they're optimized enough (Discord, VSCode, etc.).

PDF software is a different ball game as PDF is a behemoth of a specification. Did you know you could envelope 3d models within PDF files? Obviously a stripped down implementation (which you should use, if you don't require the fancier parts of PDF) will be snappier.

The slowness seems to be from the UI. PDF engines, except pdf.js, are very fast. On my Mac Mini MuPDF can render 60-100 pages per second, which means for a typical PDF you don’t even have to cache more than a couple of pages in memory at a time. Emacs (pdf-tools) uses poppler, which is slower, but still can handle scrolling through 300 mb PDFs no problem. And the Acrobat engine itself is fast. Prior to Acrobat DC it ran very smoothly on old hardware.

PDF has a lot of features, but it’s not complicated. If your PDF doesn’t contain a 3D model, that’s just some code that takes up room in the library but probably doesn’t even get paged in. A PDF is just a command stream, and the commands for drawing text are straightforward: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/developing-with-pdf/978...

As to cross platform software, what about Qt, or GTK, or WxWidgets? There isn’t a single decent Electron app. Even VSCode uses CPU sitting there doing nothing. It’s a freaking text editor, what’s happening in the background?!

> PDF has a lot of features, but it’s not complicated.

I'm not sure about, Acrobat reader in particular is very complicated, I'll rehash a famous old reddit comment --

Acrobat doesn't just read PDFs, it's a mail server, document lifecycle management system, DRM client, full-fledged document tracking system, it can have forms, it can gather statistics for your docs when you share them, it has audio and video playback. The manual is a couple thousand pages. Adobe's proposition to businesses is "You want a complete content tracking system? Wanna be able to effortlessly conduct surveys? Get next-level telemetry data from your users? Have we got the thing for you... the best part is all of your clients already have it installed!"

So good on you for ditching Adobe and not enabling this bull, SumatraPDF/emac's pdf-tools is perfect.

Regarding native GUI toolkits, they work but they're more work than Electron to deal with. Secondly, the big thing that us nerds keep failing to recognize is that software needs to be easy to use for grandmas and grandpas, part of that means having consistency in UI for users across the board from one system to the other. See how Zoom is nearly identical when using on iPad or Windows 7 or even Linux? Couldn't pull that off with GTK. I think with Qt you can modify your widgets quite a bit but you still don't have control over the minutiae of UI like you do with Electron.

Don't get me wrong it is still the wrong choice many times; the abomination that is MS Teams and Spotify is a flagrant violation of good taste and should be set on fire and nuked out of the fucking orbit, it is a heinous crime especially for big companies with the means to arrange large teams to build and deploy apps made with non-WebView-based frameworks, but for small shops I don't see any issue with Electron's use. VSCode launches instantaneously on my M2 Macbook Air. Zoom works flawlessly, along with a host of other Electron-based apps. I don't care too much if it's using some CPU here and there if I can't discern any slowness. Anyway, apps made with Tauri are much better in terms of CPU and memory usage, 1Password moved from Electron and Tauri and I'm certain more will follow and the next wave of desktop apps will surely be speedier now that Electron's slowness has become a bit of a meme.

Did you just list the advantages of web tech in the first half and then called PDF spec a behemoth? :D

Actually, PDF is not that bad at all. Sure, it has gotten some additions over the years, but even those are not actually too foreign to the original design.

At least webtech has some excuse for being a gargantuan tarantula and having its legs everywhere, PDF software is supposed to be basic document software but overreaches.

End users don't pay for desktop software any more. I wonder if this is part of the answer.

Have you tried using Okular? It's a pretty serviceable PDF reader on Linux, and now has a Windows port as well.

Okular also comes with a per-page cropping mode, though it tends to cause issues when scrolling between pages. I prefer to use pdf-crop-margins (and on encrypted PDFs, qpdf --decrypt so pdf-crop-margins can read them) to generate a pre-cropped PDF that works on any reader, but keep the original PDF around for when I like it better.

Another trick is that on large 32+ inch screens, you can use Firefox's pdf.js in horizontal scrolling view to hold 2-3 pages on-screen simultaneously and cross-reference them easily, then switch to the hand tool for easy continuous scrolling.

I was more making a comparison between PDF apps with newfangled UIs (Acrobat, anything based on Electron or PDF.js), and a complete hack in Emacs that somehow still works better. There are, of course, decent PDF apps built on 1980s/1990s UI technology. Sumatra (Win32) and Preview (directly descended from the Preview app in NeXT Step).

Isn't it the natural progression of most technical devices ?

For instance looking at coffee machines, the general direction was:

- no machine, or decent but not so advanced machines - super basic machines, or advanced but finicky machines - crappy capsule machines, or super advanced finicky machines

Depending on how you look at it, there is a path from "advanced but finicky machines" to "crappy capsule machines". Personally I think things still improved, even as the low end is still crappier than the middle/high end from decades ago.

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