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You don’t actually have to setup your web-development environment like the hype dictates. I mean, work in a Danish municipality with more than 5k employees and
by jaabe 7y ago
You don’t actually have to setup your web-development environment like the hype dictates. I mean, work in a Danish municipality with more than 5k employees and 60k citizens who directly use our, mainly web-based, solutions daily. We build around 50 a year, and maintain a few hundred of them, and almost none of them are build with a JavaScript MVVM framework.
Not because Vue/React/Angular aren’t nice, but because we don’t have to. If it doesn’t need to run offline, then a MVC framework with Ajax will do just fine, and they are extremely productive. Both because errors are server side, but also because asp mvc hasn’t really seen radical changes for almost a decade. We also rarely put things in containers, we don’t do automated CI/CD and we certainly don’t orchestrate things with Kubernetes. Not that there is anything wrong with doing that, but we’re not Netflix, we can publish a new build directly to an IIS during a slow period and no one will notice the service being gone for 5 seconds.
Sometimes I think it pays to do a little JOMO instead of all that FOMO. Especially if you don’t want to burn out. Changes are a constant in our business, but you need to make absolutely certain that adopting those changes make sense, and it has to make sense in the real world, not on hacker news. Our business doesn’t care one bit about the front-end tech stack, as long as it performs like they want it could be written in ASP webforms.
- moonrobin 7y agoWhat do JOMO and FOMO stand for? I think of FOMO as "Fear of Missing Out", the controversial motivator driving retention for free-to-play games like Fortnite, but that doesn't seem to be correct in this context.
- kawera 7y ago"Joy of Missing Out"
- circuit 7y agoI would guess "Joy of Missing Out"
- jaabe 7y agoIt’s completely anecdotal but I do hire people and I work as a part time examiner for CS students, so I do come into contact with what motivates people. Unfortunately I see a lot of fear driving people to push forward, picking up technologies because they think they have to, not because they actually need them. I mean, if I do a quick search on the Danish job agents, no one is looking for someone who knows GraphQL. Yet I see people desperately trying to learn it in their free time because they are afraid of becoming obsolete. I wonder where this fear comes from. It’s a fairly recent thing in my experience, and it’s not like it’s a buyers market. We still desperately need more developers.
- CM30 7y agoIt probably comes from the internet and how the web development media is heavily dominated by FAANG companies and trendy startups. If your reference point is these companies and their developers, then it can appear like you're getting more obsolete by the day, since they're always talking about the hottest new tech and you're seemingly not using it. It's turned web development and software engineering into a game of keeping up with the joneses. And I suspect just like with social media as a whole, it's made a lot of people feel like they're inferior to the rest of the population/their peer group. But I've got an article about that planned at some point. About how the Silicon Valley focused tech media and internet has given people the wrong impression about what most such work is like in most industries.
- jbverschoor 7y agoThey’re productive, because they’re stateless, isolated and have a super short edit-compile-run cycle. Depending on the architecture of your react/angular app, things become too big, fragile and slow
- Doubl 7y agoBut you don't work for a business, you work for the government. I think that makes a big difference in terms of what's expected and also what the consequences of non delivery are.
- watwut 7y agoWhere does non-delivery part comes from, since he said that they are productive?
- Doubl 7y agoYes I know he says that but in general if they're are no real incentives to achieve delivery and no consequences for non delivery, as is usually the case for public servants, then the results tend to be not very good.
- jaabe 7y agoHaving worked both in the public and private sectors I think it’s actually the exact opposite. If we miss a deadline, or if a system goes down when it really wasn’t supposed to the consequences can be as severe as someone dying because life-necessary data wasn’t available. The only sector which is as focused on security, on-time-delivery and risk-management that we are is banking, which is frankly rather similar to the public sector, except their business focus is much more narrow and they generally have a lot more resources. This is actually part of the reason we try to think about what technology we use and how we use it. We have too many critical systems and too few people, so we need to be extremely efficient in our choices. If something is cool, but adds complexity, then it’s just not worth it. Because we are the public sector we do a lot of benchmarking though, and we actually have ASP WebForms legacy apps that are rated as high as your favourite mobile app by our citizens. Which was my point, your users don’t actually care about your tech-stack when it delivers.