I love this article and the pluralist worldview harking back to 2015/16. I'd love to tell my team "Hey we're going to build this small separate use case in Svelte". But the evaluation checklist, which is pretty accurate, is in direct opposition to the point being made.
Assess Performance Needs: 99% of apps are not going to notice the difference, so you choose React
Team Skills and Learning Curve: Everyone knows React, nobody knows Qwik, you choose React
Scaling and Cost of Ownership: Immaterial
Ecosystem Fit: React has the more full and stable ecosystem, you choose React
On top of all this, all the AI tools have good capability with React - defaulting to it themselves - and engineers are increasingly expected to make significant use of AI tooling.
> Ecosystem Fit: React has the more full and stable ecosystem, you choose React
People always say this, but in my experience especially with modern day tooling, all the frameworks basically have the same tooling support. I mean take a look at something like the Tanstack libraries, they have support for literally every single framework out there, even some small obscure ones I've never heard of. I know there exist some big ones like Three.js wrappers and animation libraries, and especially React-specific component libraries, but really what tooling do most people miss that isn't available in Vue or Svelte but is in React exclusively? Even things like Three Fiber (for three.js) has Vue/Svelte equivalents these days.
I've been working with Vue for a long time, and at some big companies with BIG projects too, and I've literally never come across a situation where I saw a React library that didn't exist in Vue.
Hell, I'll even go controversial here and say Vue's ecosystem is better, because of the Vue Core team's decision to create Vue Router, VueX/Pinia and VueUse. These 3 things here - routing, state management and commonly reused helper/util functions - are the bane of my existence in any React codebase I've ever interacted with because there's 11 different state management tools and paradigms you have to choose from, so every single React codebase will be different from the other ones in some subtle and annoying ways. Some codebases even have multiple state management tools! With Vue, you can sort of shoot yourself in the foot if you try really hard to do so, but for the most part the large majority of projects out there stay with the idiomatic way of doing things and you don't even ever have to consider doing anything else, because the defaults just work (TM).
Nothing soured my (already negative) opinion of Crypto as much as regular conversations with a Crypto VC. Every time we spoke they were either sceptical or very excited about something that, to me, was obviously a trivial example of 1 or more classic scams. Whether or not they were excited about it didn't seem to track with the scamminess.
When I did my second startup and first to get proper VC funding, we were young and stupid and got talked into changing strategy because the VC, while not going for an actual scam, was very clearly thinking we could win a game of musical chairs that necessarily would end badly - this was a the height of the dot-com boom, and they wanted us to chase signups over revenue because per-user valuations were way out of whack with what there was any reasonable hope of earning from users who had signed up for a free service.
Their hope was we could exit before the music stopped (we didn't; we survived, barely, thanks to mostly sheer luck of having closed our B-round weeks before the bubble burst, and managed to pivot and survive with massive cuts). We still hoped we could make it profitable without that, but there was no way we could generate enough revenue to justify the exit we were hoping for, but the proportion of our budget that went to marketing certainly made achieving profitability much harder.
Which is to say that VC's often chase very high-risk ways of getting growth even in cases where they know it's just a question of time before valuations will collapse, because most of them are in the business of producing returns, not sustainable companies, and many of them are "dumb money". It's a tough business. I spend a few years in one, analysing the track records of other funds among other things, and I saw so much stupidity in that dataset.
> Which is to say that VC's often chase very high-risk ways of getting growth even in cases where they know it's just a question of time before valuations will collapse, because most of them are in the business of producing returns, not sustainable companies, and many of them are "dumb money". It's a tough business. I spend a few years in one, analysing the track records of other funds among other things, and I saw so much stupidity in that dataset.
This is a highly logical approach by VCs simply due to their business model of only needing one hit out of hundreds to make a positive return. Reading a recent article called Why You Shouldn't Join YC [0] was quite illuminating with regards to this fact. It is the ergodicity that kills most startups, which is exactly what VCs capitalize on. Personally, most of the counterarguments in the HN thread do not move me, of course a startup might pivot but they need not do it based on the VCs' insistence.
That’s sort of general problem with people regardless of industry who’ve drunk the startup coolaid … wrong way around, let’s say. The point of innovation is not to reinvent the wheel. Saying you are startuppy does not excuse you from actually learning about the field. One could even radically propose knowledge of field helps to find innovations. What one should avoid is saying ’no’ just because such a thing does not exist yet. If the thing exists, has a name like ’Big Bad Mistake’, you should at least acknowledge it. (Yeah yeah, rockets were impossible and Musk beat them but that happened via respect of existing art and extending it, not completely ignoring it).
What soured my opinion was everyone and their dog trying to explain to me how they were going to get rich with bitcoin and NFTs.
And this was when I was actively employed developing crypto finance instruments! Like, I have warned people not to buy the thing I have built because they did not understand it.
It is/was a great playground for modeling different instruments imo, but people don't want to treat it like the back alley casino it is.
I would suggest because the sentiment is a trite misrepresentation of people's experiences across multiple facets. Throughout the summer you'll smell weed constantly if you're out and about and never see anyone so much as approached by any nearby police, regardless of who they are.
In the US, we walk at traffic when there are cars on the road but the passing lane is the same (left) for driving roads and for pedestrian multi-lane "roads" like escalators.
Depends what you mean by "the remainder of the world". Most mid-tier companies I've worked at or know people who work at in London started moving on from microservices some time ago. So I guess, unsurprisingly, no.
> Most mid-tier companies I've worked at or know people who work at in London started moving on from microservices some time ago
Are we talking about the same London? The market is still flooded with engineering playgrounds and microservices are still considered a perk and bragging point by many companies.
Finding a company with a sane tech stack that doesn't do complexity for the sake of complexity is impossible. It makes sense though - those companies already have their developers, they are happy and the company doesn't need to hire more.
Leaving them in the room to complete the tasks was an early red flag here. If you have no insight into how people think about and complete tasks then you are testing the product of their time, not their approach to problem solving. You then shouldn’t be surprised by the lack of what you didn’t test for after the fact.
This is great, I would upvote it more if I could. Also very accurate on the lack of required empathy.
The combination of your last points and "hard work does not pay off" are something that it took me until 32 (and arguably then only because of lockdowns) to learn. Working hard on your employer's problems is unlikely to be fulfilling, they will never give you the influence or credit you want (or maybe deserve?) because of "hard work". Working hard on your own things or with people you care about is where you can earn fulfillment. And I don't mean a $10,000/month side hustle, I mean tiny incremental improvements on things you enjoy but may suck at. For me it's been attempting to learn another spoken language, which I'm still comically bad at 3 years later, and some other hobbies which I'm also lower-end-of-the-curve bad at but get a lot of enjoyment from.
I feel a bit of this every time there are pushes to get everyone to code, it's very weird. Sort of related is the expectation that you should just be able to switch into a programming career in a few weeks. You can't do that with almost any other meaningful career but for some reason you "should" be able to for programming and there are very profitable businesses selling the lie that you can.
I agree, the expectation of everyone being able to switch to a programming career is of course ridiculous. Neither should this be the expectation nor should everyone actually get into a programming career. Better to leave that to the professionals, who have chosen this path and have the necessary education to avoid building in the typical traps. Learning programming can take a week, but mastering it may take a lifetime.
Just the fact, that a person can write a little bit of code, does not mean, that it must become their profession.
However, I do think, that people should be able to make use of the tools they have. Learning a little bit of programming can get people going a long way and there are so many learning resources out there, that you can learn more any time you want. (Of course tutorial hell is a thing.) We really should encourage people to become computer literate and to become enabled. There is no reason to keep our knowledge from people.
Consdering the state of learning materials for the remainder of my educational (and professional, I'm looking at you compliance courses) life, it really is mindblowing what they achieved with Encarta in the '90s.
Assess Performance Needs: 99% of apps are not going to notice the difference, so you choose React
Team Skills and Learning Curve: Everyone knows React, nobody knows Qwik, you choose React
Scaling and Cost of Ownership: Immaterial
Ecosystem Fit: React has the more full and stable ecosystem, you choose React
On top of all this, all the AI tools have good capability with React - defaulting to it themselves - and engineers are increasingly expected to make significant use of AI tooling.