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Re: Everyone agreed it needed modernization—it looked like it was from the early 2000s, after all! My goodness, Flintones even. The fashion chase is becoming o

by tabtab 8y ago

Re: Everyone agreed it needed modernization—it looked like it was from the early 2000s, after all! My goodness, Flintones even. The fashion chase is becoming obsessive and wasteful. As I've ranted about many times on HN, UI faddism is a huge time and resource drain and the industry should just say no or see a therapist. It sounds strange, but desktop UI's around 2000 pretty much reached the pinnacle of business UI's. The web slid us downhill with its stateless ways, unpredictable layout results, and now wasting screen space while copying touch-screen-oriented design for mouse users who don't need swollen boundaries. Use 5-pixel lines to visually segregate panels, saving you about 20 pixels of width versus white space. ("Web" pixels, not nec. actual pixels.) (The only exception is perhaps drill-down link-heavy lists/reports/charts. The web served these well.)

ryandrake 8y ago
I’m convinced this happens everywhere, at almost every software company. As a developer, the most demotivating part of my job was the endless redesigns-for-the-sake-of-redesigns that kept happening. It’s ultimately what drove me away from being an individual contributor software engineer. And it’s always for goofy vague reasons: “It looks dated!” “It needs more pop!” “It’s not fresh enough!” (What are we making? Software or food?) Nobody is willing or able to prove with numbers or measurement that the old UI is bad and the new UI is better. It’s usually just the designer’s hunch! Yet if I want to change the search algorithm we are using I have to prove the new one is faster with research...
- tabtab 8y ago
  Everyone is afraid of being "left behind" and not being able to get a job. Keeping one's resume marketable trumps being productive.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    I'm starting to look forward to the days when I can just work on old projects in semi-retirement, where all of this stuff doesn't matter, and the languages and frameworks are the ones that I grew up with. This isn't to say there's no new good stuff. The problem is that there's also all the new fads, and it's a very rare job when you can get the good without the fads.
- lqet 8y ago
  Nobody ever talks about the psychological toll this takes on developers, and also on the overall software quality. If you are just re-building the same UI over and over again because "everyone is now doing it in Django / Angular / Vue / React / {insert future hyped framework}", no developer will go the extra mile to produce a stable, high-quality code base anymore. Why should they, if they instinctively know that they are just coding for the garbage bin? What you get is a team of depressed, cynical developers and low-quality software that barely works, which will then be re-implemented 12-24 months lather in some other framework, possibly by another team of developers because the old team has left in frustration or been fired for lack of motivation. It is a vicious circle that consumes the most productive age of an entire software engineer generation, and (although I am sure some of you will heavily criticize this) I am deeply convinced that the only way out of this is to just stick to basic tools and programming languages that have been around forever. Avoid any framework that is advocated like a religious cult.
  - crooked-v 8y ago
    Eventually, one of those current frameworks will "have been around forever". My bet is on React or one of its descendants, because viewed as a generic API it's a pretty good philosophical refinement of preexisting non-web-specific UI frameworks. For example, there's now a framework that implements the React API for general-purpose terminal rendering, without actually involving any web stuff at all: https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink
    - lqet 8y ago
      > My bet is on React Exactly, it is a bet. A bet in which you can win nothing more than a refined résumé, or lose a lot of time. In the context of web development, in the past 10 years I have seen other developers and myself write wrappers for the same JavaScript libraries again and again and again in so many frameworks and for so many CMS I lost track and count (incomplete list: typo3, Drupal, Wordpress, GWT, jQuery, AngularJS, React). This usually included weeks of work, after which it was possible to write web applications which could've been written with vanilla JavaScript on a static, handwritten HTML page in a single afternoon. From a macroeconomic point of view, it was all just an incredible waste of time. But the customers of the various companies I worked at as a student and after finishing university loved hearing the name of the frameworks. I am pretty convinced that it actually would've been enough to just write bare JS code and a HTML page by hand and sell it to them as "written in bootstrapped AngularJS". This would've saved hundreds of man hours.
- beamatronic 8y ago
  Not only does it happen almost everywhere but is has been going on since the beginning. There were people in the 90’s who did nothing but study UI’s, what happened to them??
  - goatlover 8y ago
    The web happened. And now people use the web GUI to make destkop and mobile applications.
  - mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
    They are called UX researchers and they exist alive and well today. There is a huge difference between design backed by research and just doing things to keep up with times.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  Wow, I kinda wish I worked somewhere with so few real problems they had to invent new ones just to keep busy.
khazhou 8y ago
Also remember: you MUST kill any Java-based enterprise app (Java is old and not modern) and replace the backend with Node.js. Then you can reuse all your server code in the frontend! And remember to use Angular or React... actually, now you must use Vue. And create polyfills for your webpacks (and vice versa).
acutesoftware 8y ago
I wish more web apps would give a bit more choice on information density and layout - remember desktop software 15 years ago? You change all the colours, fonts, layouts (sometimes) so it suited you. White space is great for new users to help not overload them, but after a few weeks of use, most should be able to go to their options and change the layout to save all this pointless mouse wheel scrolling. I am impressed at the responses in this thread - I honestly thought I was in the minority about this, but hopefully the fashion moves a little more towards functionality

by tabtab 8y ago

ryandrake 8y ago

I’m convinced this happens everywhere, at almost every software company. As a developer, the most demotivating part of my job was the endless redesigns-for-the-sake-of-redesigns that kept happening. It’s ultimately what drove me away from being an individual contributor software engineer. And it’s always for goofy vague reasons: “It looks dated!” “It needs more pop!” “It’s not fresh enough!” (What are we making? Software or food?) Nobody is willing or able to prove with numbers or measurement that the old UI is bad and the new UI is better. It’s usually just the designer’s hunch! Yet if I want to change the search algorithm we are using I have to prove the new one is faster with research...

tabtab 8y ago
Everyone is afraid of being "left behind" and not being able to get a job. Keeping one's resume marketable trumps being productive.
- int_19h 8y ago
  I'm starting to look forward to the days when I can just work on old projects in semi-retirement, where all of this stuff doesn't matter, and the languages and frameworks are the ones that I grew up with. This isn't to say there's no new good stuff. The problem is that there's also all the new fads, and it's a very rare job when you can get the good without the fads.
lqet 8y ago
Nobody ever talks about the psychological toll this takes on developers, and also on the overall software quality. If you are just re-building the same UI over and over again because "everyone is now doing it in Django / Angular / Vue / React / {insert future hyped framework}", no developer will go the extra mile to produce a stable, high-quality code base anymore. Why should they, if they instinctively know that they are just coding for the garbage bin? What you get is a team of depressed, cynical developers and low-quality software that barely works, which will then be re-implemented 12-24 months lather in some other framework, possibly by another team of developers because the old team has left in frustration or been fired for lack of motivation. It is a vicious circle that consumes the most productive age of an entire software engineer generation, and (although I am sure some of you will heavily criticize this) I am deeply convinced that the only way out of this is to just stick to basic tools and programming languages that have been around forever. Avoid any framework that is advocated like a religious cult.
- crooked-v 8y ago
  Eventually, one of those current frameworks will "have been around forever". My bet is on React or one of its descendants, because viewed as a generic API it's a pretty good philosophical refinement of preexisting non-web-specific UI frameworks. For example, there's now a framework that implements the React API for general-purpose terminal rendering, without actually involving any web stuff at all: https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink https://github.com/vadimdemedes/ink
  - lqet 8y ago
    > My bet is on React Exactly, it is a bet. A bet in which you can win nothing more than a refined résumé, or lose a lot of time. In the context of web development, in the past 10 years I have seen other developers and myself write wrappers for the same JavaScript libraries again and again and again in so many frameworks and for so many CMS I lost track and count (incomplete list: typo3, Drupal, Wordpress, GWT, jQuery, AngularJS, React). This usually included weeks of work, after which it was possible to write web applications which could've been written with vanilla JavaScript on a static, handwritten HTML page in a single afternoon. From a macroeconomic point of view, it was all just an incredible waste of time. But the customers of the various companies I worked at as a student and after finishing university loved hearing the name of the frameworks. I am pretty convinced that it actually would've been enough to just write bare JS code and a HTML page by hand and sell it to them as "written in bootstrapped AngularJS". This would've saved hundreds of man hours.
beamatronic 8y ago
Not only does it happen almost everywhere but is has been going on since the beginning. There were people in the 90’s who did nothing but study UI’s, what happened to them??
- goatlover 8y ago
  The web happened. And now people use the web GUI to make destkop and mobile applications.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
  They are called UX researchers and they exist alive and well today. There is a huge difference between design backed by research and just doing things to keep up with times.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
Wow, I kinda wish I worked somewhere with so few real problems they had to invent new ones just to keep busy.

khazhou 8y ago

Also remember: you MUST kill any Java-based enterprise app (Java is old and not modern) and replace the backend with Node.js. Then you can reuse all your server code in the frontend! And remember to use Angular or React... actually, now you must use Vue. And create polyfills for your webpacks (and vice versa).

acutesoftware 8y ago

I wish more web apps would give a bit more choice on information density and layout - remember desktop software 15 years ago? You change all the colours, fonts, layouts (sometimes) so it suited you. White space is great for new users to help not overload them, but after a few weeks of use, most should be able to go to their options and change the layout to save all this pointless mouse wheel scrolling. I am impressed at the responses in this thread - I honestly thought I was in the minority about this, but hopefully the fashion moves a little more towards functionality