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What the hell does the broader business care about web frameworks? Everyone's on salary and there's deadlines. You wanna really eliminate people? Start missing

What the hell does the broader business care about web frameworks? Everyone's on salary and there's deadlines. You wanna really eliminate people? Start missing deadlines. They'll replace everyone with contractors indiscriminately regardless of how much you love python or rust and hate javascript.

austin-cheney 3y ago
The purpose of software is automation. If that means eliminating positions that cannot achieve automation, because they just fill in the blanks of some tool API, then so be it. Ultimately it comes down to a single business question: What costs more, training people or hiring many replaceable people to backfill some tool?
- sublinear 3y ago
  That's a naive perspective of web dev or any dev for that matter. What "training"? You're getting ripped off if you're getting billed for that beyond a subscription to Udemy or whatever. I can't think of any dev projects I've ever worked on that weren't full of unique problems to solve web or otherwise. Most of the work is integration, not just making a frontend, and much of that bleeds into the frontend anyway. What costs the most is destroying projects and burning bridges with clients after delivering crap just to save a few bucks. Assuming your projects are scoped correctly, the ratio of devs to projects tends to be about pizza scale (3 to 5 people or so). If you're trying to lean it out more than that, expect disasters or at least to be significantly late on deadlines. If you try to hire "replaceable people" you must anticipate what happens when they're replaced. False economy is what's being sold to ignorant bosses the world over. If cutting payroll despite all this common advice still looks like the only way, you're dealing with years of debt at the hands of severe incompetence. What's being made is always more important than how much it costs. Costs are far less flexible than the sale price. Automation is not a silver bullet and most software dev is already as cheap as it gets in any industry. Just give up and sell the company to someone who knows better before further eroding the value left. Leave the employees alone.
  - austin-cheney 3y ago
    The perspective is not naive. I have been writing frontend code for 25 years and been a full time JavaScript developer for 15 years. The single greatest human problem I encounter in this space is insecurity and a variety of compensating or masking behaviors. That insecurity is almost universally the result of poor preparation.

austin-cheney 3y ago

The purpose of software is automation. If that means eliminating positions that cannot achieve automation, because they just fill in the blanks of some tool API, then so be it. Ultimately it comes down to a single business question: What costs more, training people or hiring many replaceable people to backfill some tool?

sublinear 3y ago
That's a naive perspective of web dev or any dev for that matter. What "training"? You're getting ripped off if you're getting billed for that beyond a subscription to Udemy or whatever. I can't think of any dev projects I've ever worked on that weren't full of unique problems to solve web or otherwise. Most of the work is integration, not just making a frontend, and much of that bleeds into the frontend anyway. What costs the most is destroying projects and burning bridges with clients after delivering crap just to save a few bucks. Assuming your projects are scoped correctly, the ratio of devs to projects tends to be about pizza scale (3 to 5 people or so). If you're trying to lean it out more than that, expect disasters or at least to be significantly late on deadlines. If you try to hire "replaceable people" you must anticipate what happens when they're replaced. False economy is what's being sold to ignorant bosses the world over. If cutting payroll despite all this common advice still looks like the only way, you're dealing with years of debt at the hands of severe incompetence. What's being made is always more important than how much it costs. Costs are far less flexible than the sale price. Automation is not a silver bullet and most software dev is already as cheap as it gets in any industry. Just give up and sell the company to someone who knows better before further eroding the value left. Leave the employees alone.
- austin-cheney 3y ago
  The perspective is not naive. I have been writing frontend code for 25 years and been a full time JavaScript developer for 15 years. The single greatest human problem I encounter in this space is insecurity and a variety of compensating or masking behaviors. That insecurity is almost universally the result of poor preparation.