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The ember roll out within LinkedIn has been a disaster from those I know still working there. No one likes it and it takes over 20 minutes to "build" the code

The ember roll out within LinkedIn has been a disaster from those I know still working there. No one likes it and it takes over 20 minutes to "build" the code from scratch. We're talking about frontend code, mind you. At a certain level in LinkedIn, someone decided to standardize on Ember. Fine. But there were many issues, and instead of finding a more suitable and workable pragmatic framework, LinkedIn is instead deciding to hire Ember people to fix up their framework so it's actually useable. We really do work in the only industry where you can get hired to fix a mess you created yourself. Anyway, besides the recruiter app, is LinkedIn really worthy of a SPA experience? Last time I checked isn't most of the traffic a quick "accept connection" or reply to inmail, or maybe check who viewed your profile bounce? Does the average user actually spend time in it? Probably not. I'm reminded by a certain quote from a friend: "At a certain level in McDonald's, the managers start thinking of themselves as restaurateurs, and not fast food servants."

luketheobscure 10y ago
I can't imagine where that 20 minutes number came from. Maybe a fresh `git clone && npm install && bower install && ember start`... But even then that seems very high (and somewhat irrelevant since subsequent builds will take seconds). Citation needed? The people who are talking publicly seem very excited about how things are going. Chris Thoburn (runspired) was on Ember Weekend a few weeks ago talking about the work he's doing on Ember Data over at LinkedIn.
- cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
  if you count all the jenkins task with automated unit tests and integration tests, etc. this is pretty believable. It happens all the time.
- iamleppert 10y ago
  I can't give you a direct citation, sadly. And this is just one anecdote, there are many others on how this choice of framework has actually contributed to losses of productivity, the exact opposite of what its supposed to do, I assume?
gravyboat 10y ago
LinkedIn tried to hire me to help with their SaltStack infrastructure several years ago when they were first rolling it out/beefing up their infra with it and I emphatically said no. Even if I like working with the technology I would never work somewhere like LinkedIn, they are scum and working there lowers my opinion of a person.
- Desustorm 10y ago
  Out of interest, why are they scum? Never heard this before about LinkedIn.
  - pimeys 10y ago
    I don't know are they really scum, but also for me the platform is mostly clueless headhunter bots offering Ruby positions even without reading my CV. Ok, I know it's nice that we have headhunters banging our doors, but when you like to do things properly yourself, you kind of expect the same from the headhunters. P.S. I never took any jobs from that platform.
  - mzzter 10y ago
    I'm curious to know about this too.
    - weq 10y ago
      LinkedIn is click-bait personified
  - throwaway7767 10y ago
    Where to start? * They steal the address book of any user who installs their app, collecting private information of people who have given no such consent * They then proceed to create shadow profiles of all those people that haven't registered, creating the illusion that more people are on LinkedIn than really are (not sure if they still do this) * They then start spamming all those contacts with multiple emails per day, for several days, asking them to register with LinkedIn. There is no "fuck off and stop emailing me" button, the only way to make it stop is to register for an account I've blacklisted linkedin.com in my mailservers for this reason. And I would agree with the GP that they are scum and that working there lowers my opinion of a person.
biznizcat 10y ago
I have worked on the Ember apps since the beginning of the project. It easily takes 20 minutes to start a server up. At its worst it took me maybe 35 minutes-- enough time to come to work, start the server, go have breakfast. Add in that the server crashes a couple times a day and I lose ten hours a week from tooling. It used to take a huge amount of time to initialize a repository as well, but they recently switched to Yarn and that helped a lot. I'm planning on leaving because as parent says, it's been a disaster from start to finish. Developer tooling does not help you be productive, the app performance is quite poor, and it's just not enjoyable to work on.
pier25 10y ago
> Anyway, besides the recruiter app, is LinkedIn really worthy of a SPA experience? In some cases it makes sense, but very few websites really need to be SPAs yet everyone these days is using React, Angular, Ember, etc. Facebook created React to not depend on other frameworks. They also added HTML and CSS into JS because their application is huge and complex. At their size it makes sense to have all the bits needed to work on something in the same place. Redux, same thing. It's a solution that is intended to solve problems at the 1B users scale. The truth is 99.99% of web applications won't come close to that level of complexity, but devs insist in using solutions React and Redux because... hype? It's like driving with a school bus to carry 1 person. Dan Abramov has said himself that it doesn't make sense to use Redux until you need it. Same thing with all those JS UI benchmarks. There must be a use case for rendering and doing data binding in 10000 UI elements at 60 fps, but those are very rare edge cases. I'm guilty of this myself. I've spent 2016 working with React on a few SPAs and I have to admit I only got in it or the hype. Everyone was doing it which must mean it's the best way to go, right? Wrong. I'm moving away from SPAs in 2017. Going back the classic route of generating dynamic HTML in the server and sprinkle pages with JS "widgets" whenever I REALLY need those UI enhancements. If I need an SPA for a particular use case, sure I'll do it, but not as a default option. Edit: In mobile SPAs makes even less sense. Sure you may be reducing requests, eventually, but the CPU usage is bigger and the initial load is also bigger. And sure, you can really optimise an SPA but this adds complexity on top of complexity. Sites like HN and Reddit have proven that content is king.
- KurtMueller 10y ago
  React and redux don't have to be a part of a SPA. You can have server-rendered pages with some react-based widgets on them. I think react and redux is great for that kind of stuff - I know I enjoy building widgets using react and redux as opposed to jQuery.
  - pier25 10y ago
    In that case why not use something more lightweight such as Vue?
- KurtMueller 10y ago

luketheobscure 10y ago

I can't imagine where that 20 minutes number came from. Maybe a fresh `git clone && npm install && bower install && ember start`... But even then that seems very high (and somewhat irrelevant since subsequent builds will take seconds). Citation needed? The people who are talking publicly seem very excited about how things are going. Chris Thoburn (runspired) was on Ember Weekend a few weeks ago talking about the work he's doing on Ember Data over at LinkedIn.

cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
if you count all the jenkins task with automated unit tests and integration tests, etc. this is pretty believable. It happens all the time.
iamleppert 10y ago
I can't give you a direct citation, sadly. And this is just one anecdote, there are many others on how this choice of framework has actually contributed to losses of productivity, the exact opposite of what its supposed to do, I assume?

gravyboat 10y ago

LinkedIn tried to hire me to help with their SaltStack infrastructure several years ago when they were first rolling it out/beefing up their infra with it and I emphatically said no. Even if I like working with the technology I would never work somewhere like LinkedIn, they are scum and working there lowers my opinion of a person.

Desustorm 10y ago
Out of interest, why are they scum? Never heard this before about LinkedIn.
- pimeys 10y ago
  I don't know are they really scum, but also for me the platform is mostly clueless headhunter bots offering Ruby positions even without reading my CV. Ok, I know it's nice that we have headhunters banging our doors, but when you like to do things properly yourself, you kind of expect the same from the headhunters. P.S. I never took any jobs from that platform.
- mzzter 10y ago
  I'm curious to know about this too.
  - weq 10y ago
    LinkedIn is click-bait personified
- throwaway7767 10y ago
  Where to start? * They steal the address book of any user who installs their app, collecting private information of people who have given no such consent * They then proceed to create shadow profiles of all those people that haven't registered, creating the illusion that more people are on LinkedIn than really are (not sure if they still do this) * They then start spamming all those contacts with multiple emails per day, for several days, asking them to register with LinkedIn. There is no "fuck off and stop emailing me" button, the only way to make it stop is to register for an account I've blacklisted linkedin.com in my mailservers for this reason. And I would agree with the GP that they are scum and that working there lowers my opinion of a person.

biznizcat 10y ago

I have worked on the Ember apps since the beginning of the project. It easily takes 20 minutes to start a server up. At its worst it took me maybe 35 minutes-- enough time to come to work, start the server, go have breakfast. Add in that the server crashes a couple times a day and I lose ten hours a week from tooling. It used to take a huge amount of time to initialize a repository as well, but they recently switched to Yarn and that helped a lot. I'm planning on leaving because as parent says, it's been a disaster from start to finish. Developer tooling does not help you be productive, the app performance is quite poor, and it's just not enjoyable to work on.

pier25 10y ago

> Anyway, besides the recruiter app, is LinkedIn really worthy of a SPA experience? In some cases it makes sense, but very few websites really need to be SPAs yet everyone these days is using React, Angular, Ember, etc. Facebook created React to not depend on other frameworks. They also added HTML and CSS into JS because their application is huge and complex. At their size it makes sense to have all the bits needed to work on something in the same place. Redux, same thing. It's a solution that is intended to solve problems at the 1B users scale. The truth is 99.99% of web applications won't come close to that level of complexity, but devs insist in using solutions React and Redux because... hype? It's like driving with a school bus to carry 1 person. Dan Abramov has said himself that it doesn't make sense to use Redux until you need it. Same thing with all those JS UI benchmarks. There must be a use case for rendering and doing data binding in 10000 UI elements at 60 fps, but those are very rare edge cases. I'm guilty of this myself. I've spent 2016 working with React on a few SPAs and I have to admit I only got in it or the hype. Everyone was doing it which must mean it's the best way to go, right? Wrong. I'm moving away from SPAs in 2017. Going back the classic route of generating dynamic HTML in the server and sprinkle pages with JS "widgets" whenever I REALLY need those UI enhancements. If I need an SPA for a particular use case, sure I'll do it, but not as a default option. Edit: In mobile SPAs makes even less sense. Sure you may be reducing requests, eventually, but the CPU usage is bigger and the initial load is also bigger. And sure, you can really optimise an SPA but this adds complexity on top of complexity. Sites like HN and Reddit have proven that content is king.

KurtMueller 10y ago
React and redux don't have to be a part of a SPA. You can have server-rendered pages with some react-based widgets on them. I think react and redux is great for that kind of stuff - I know I enjoy building widgets using react and redux as opposed to jQuery.
- pier25 10y ago
  In that case why not use something more lightweight such as Vue?
KurtMueller 10y ago