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Yes, many large companies seek technological solutions to political problems. I've worked for dysfunctional organizations; they want technology to provide the

Yes, many large companies seek technological solutions to political problems. I've worked for dysfunctional organizations; they want technology to provide the decisions bottom-up because, for whatever reason, nobody wants to make any hard calls. These projects fail because you simply can't have success that way. If this is a political and organizational problem, then this choice of technology is entirely not about the pros and cons that have probably been debated to death in this topic. I agree. I think you've added some really good insight in this conversation. But I think that solution is dumb. It's especially dumb for a software company because software is their core competency. That's where they should be spending their resources on. They should be minimizing costs but not at the cost of their core product.

Androider 7y ago
I wouldn't class this as political problems. Is Facebook having a gazillion developers on their app a political problem, or necessary given what they want it to do? How is replicating that for each platform a good solution, in any sense (political or technical)? Tech companies core competencies are the service or product that they provide. Making it N times for N platforms is a hurdle that doesn't improve on the core, it's a cost of the fragmented market. I'm arguing that it makes perfect sense both technically and politically to focus your vast majority of developers on your core, and only having specialized platform teams were necessary as a cost of doing business. How is developers re-implementing every UI screen and feature across iOS and Android helping Shopify customers sell more merch?
- wvenable 7y ago
  > Is Facebook having a gazillion developers on their app a political problem, or necessary given what they want it to do? Yes. How is it not a political problem? It's not a technological one. > How is replicating that for each platform a good solution, in any sense (political or technical)? It doesn't change anything politically but technologically platform abstractions are never 100%. You always need an expert for each platform anyway and by targeting the abstraction rather than the platform you're just targeting a crappier experience for your end users and often your developers as well. React Native is not without it's issues. So what's the benefit? You're not saving expertise. Even sharing code isn't that important -- once decisions have been made, features planned out in detail, server APIs created, the actual platform specific code is a pretty small part overall. You still have to test on each platform individually. Fix platform specific bugs even in non-platform specific code. And you're not creating a dependency on a 3rd party that you don't control. > How is developers re-implementing every UI screen and feature across iOS and Android helping Shopify customers sell more merch? How is it not? I mean the argument here is that there is a huge savings to justify the risk but I don't think that's true.

Androider 7y ago

I wouldn't class this as political problems. Is Facebook having a gazillion developers on their app a political problem, or necessary given what they want it to do? How is replicating that for each platform a good solution, in any sense (political or technical)? Tech companies core competencies are the service or product that they provide. Making it N times for N platforms is a hurdle that doesn't improve on the core, it's a cost of the fragmented market. I'm arguing that it makes perfect sense both technically and politically to focus your vast majority of developers on your core, and only having specialized platform teams were necessary as a cost of doing business. How is developers re-implementing every UI screen and feature across iOS and Android helping Shopify customers sell more merch?

wvenable 7y ago
> Is Facebook having a gazillion developers on their app a political problem, or necessary given what they want it to do? Yes. How is it not a political problem? It's not a technological one. > How is replicating that for each platform a good solution, in any sense (political or technical)? It doesn't change anything politically but technologically platform abstractions are never 100%. You always need an expert for each platform anyway and by targeting the abstraction rather than the platform you're just targeting a crappier experience for your end users and often your developers as well. React Native is not without it's issues. So what's the benefit? You're not saving expertise. Even sharing code isn't that important -- once decisions have been made, features planned out in detail, server APIs created, the actual platform specific code is a pretty small part overall. You still have to test on each platform individually. Fix platform specific bugs even in non-platform specific code. And you're not creating a dependency on a 3rd party that you don't control. > How is developers re-implementing every UI screen and feature across iOS and Android helping Shopify customers sell more merch? How is it not? I mean the argument here is that there is a huge savings to justify the risk but I don't think that's true.