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Comment by noobermin | Hacker News Reader

>And seriously, your six-page website with slideshow and photo gallery does not need a React-Angular-Vue hybrid frontend, Firebase logging, analytics, local storage, or any of the other 75 JavaScript files served from eight different external domains.

As a web developer, can you tell us why this happens, and how do we stop it? I see no market reason for it, it certainly doesn't make your business make more money, it feels much more like groupthink in the industry and chasing hype.

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If you build it, devs will come. People want to use new tech and any interesting feature finds users.

New things tend to never be less complex than old things, and unless the devs experience the pain of things being slow, they’ll keep building in bloat (i.e. as long as things run well on their new several thousand dollar macbooks)

>People want to use new tech and any interesting feature finds users.

No user cares about the front end framework you use unless such a choice affects performance though. That's my point, it's something developers enjoy, but users really do not care about.

Semi-direct response from someone else: https://infrequently.org/2023/02/the-market-for-lemons/

It’s an interesting analysis but I think the cause is less conscious and more of a side-effect of overstaffed tech companies giving too much importance and reward to tooling projects (i.e. tech marketing/reputation)

This is a fantastic post. You should share here on HN

Why does it happen? CV stuffing. Hiring managers are always looking for developers having 10 years experience with the latest technology that was released last year </sarcasm>.

Hiring managers don't care about how simple your previous solutions were to build and maintain and whether it allowed your customers to continue using "outdated" systems. If you don't have the latest alphabet soup of technology on your CV and you just got laid-off by your cush job then good like finding another job!

As a result, everybody stays on the technology treadmill and looking for opportunities to use the latest and greatest technologies so they can include that on their CV and appear to be relevant. This is also great for the conference circuit and "developer advocates" leading sessions on how to use the latest-and-greatest technologies to build the same damn things we've been building for the past 20 years. Except now you need training and new tooling and you don't know where all the gotchas are in the development. Consultants will swoop in (who also have zero experience with these technologies other than some side project they did) and "help" you spend that abundant cash you don't have.

It's sad. It's really, really sad - but it's been this way for the past 40 years (probably longer - that's just how long I've been developing software) and I don't see it ending anytime soon.

Meanwhile, God created the world in six days using Emacs to write Lisp code running on a Unix kernel created with C...

The market reason is companies internally rewarding engineers for developing and marketing these tech projects, then cargo cult in the industry for less sophisticated management and investors, coupled with resume building of developers. All of that fueled by easy money. That makes powerful incentives aligned.

not the OP, but I guess much of the software or the sites are shipped when "good enough", not "when optimal", nobody pays you for optimizing the page or the app for speed, when it's fast enough on their iPhone 14

Because it looks better. No one except the HN crowd likes pulling up a site and seeing static HTML.

That's a bit of an extreme and that isn't what I or anyone else in OP was saying was the only alternative for a six page web app. There is definitely a space between plain HTML and the "hybrid Angular-React-Vue frontend[0]" that doesn't require a huge number of js frameworks to render six pages.

[0] yes even I Mr. scientist know that's a joke, but don't think it's too far off.

This is a styling issue for the majority of web apps.

I know that personally, I would prefer a Jira (or Twitter) that doesn't show a half-rendered page with a million little spinners in every content area. This is using what I imagine is some kind of React-like abomination. It is the furthest thing from fast, or attractive.

A slideshow and some toggle functionality is fine. But you don't need a react/vue etc framework for that, and 99% of websites fall within this requirement.

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