Ask HN: What's the most frustrating thing about Software/Web Development?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19825482

by joemanaco • 7 years ago

8 10 7 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

stephenr2• 7 years ago

Cool kid developers cargo culting flavour of the week technology; and/or front end developers changing their libraries/frameworks/tool chains more often than they change their underwear.

muzani2• 7 years ago

Why is this an issue though? Just ignore the new technology that isn't much better than the old one.

stephenr2• 7 years ago

It’s hard to ignore something when a client decides to use a technology.

arbhassan• 7 years ago

This used to be a problem in 2015.

CM30• 7 years ago

Poor project management. It's very rare you see a company/team come up with a plan and stick to it, without deciding to randomly overhaul a bunch of stuff or add more features/complexity midway through.

Then again, it's a close one. I'd say also one of the following may take it:

How the site/app/program always seems to fall apart whenever the boss looks at it, or how the developers struggle to replicate said issues when testing it later.

How in web development, every browser seems to have its own half assed idea about which features to implement and how to implement them, rather than just sticking to the damn spec and keeping it consistent with other browsers.

The flavour of the week stuff, with developers constantly wanting to use the latest shiny framework.

Or perhaps how many designers seem to act like they're making a painting rather than an application, with zero thought put into how it scales between sizes, how things may fit in a grid, how various conditions (like errors) work etc.

n4bz0r• 7 years ago

Having to struggle through a boredom of implementing the thing after all the interesting challenges are solved.

This doesn't necessarily apply to an entire product, could be a separate feature or even pieces of features.

With great product comes great boredom

karmakaze• 7 years ago

Having to stick with established, popular languages, frameworks, etc.

From a biz standpoint it makes sense to use what's well known, time-tested, stack-overflow answered, and easy to hire for.

From a developer's perspective, it's older, boring, and less effective than newer ones. Probably much less so in front-end as there seems to be much more rapid adoption.

The best case scenario would be solving a problem in-house then open-sourcing it.

muzani2• 7 years ago

Scrum isn't designed to make work more productive for the developers. It's mostly because development is a chaotic process, and it forces everyone on the team to sync regularly. The overhead for scrum is high, and gets in the way of flow. It's good for menial work, the kind where a dev doesn't have to think over a problem for several days and just ticks things off a checkbox.

erik_seaberg• 7 years ago

The industry does not agree with me that boilerplate is a pure waste of human lifetime, and a language that's either more powerful or more domain-specific would pay off very quickly.

tmm84• 7 years ago

Smartphone compatibility, display and usage. So many different browsers, OS versions and screen sizes make it a minefield.

Ask HN: What's the most frustrating thing about Software/Web Development?

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