Comment by bob1029

I strongly believe the technology becoming faster is itself the biggest problem around slow technology. The constraints of slow hardware forced developers to do things "the right way". Today, you can serialize a gigabyte of JSON before the user will likely notice. Really hard to not be tempted by this dark path of incremental performance cuts in favor of dev-time convenience.

Just look a bit further down the front page of HN today and you'll find a legitimately-heated debate regarding whether ORMs bring value or no. But, who can blame the developers? The pressure from management is eternal and some of us like to spend our time on non-computer problems too. Reaching for a JSON serializer or ElectronJS over Win32 and raw SQL is an understandable decision when presented with real-life pressures.

I think if we want to see good user experiences, the capitalists and management will need to start prioritizing them again (at their own expense). This is a very difficult narrative to sell, but I've had some traction in my company with "higher order consequences of good UX today means more sales in the future" kind of talk. There is also a story about pride in the product and the improvements this brings for internal operations. Imagine if your executive leadership came into the room, smack talked the electron JS pile and insisted it be rewritten from scratch while targeting native toolchains? Would that be enough of a fire to get the average developer to start thinking again or are we too far gone at this point? Clearly, we are mostly beyond the phase of "valiant developer works overtime to strive for better UX despite any and all mgmt pressures".