There have been some large scale companies that went under because of platforms chosen to develop their products in. First that comes to mind is MySpace with Dreamweaver.

In my experience frontend bugs are usually from over-complicated business logic with layout-issues a distant second.

That requires business logic to run in the frontend in the first place though. One could argue it shouldn't. Anything that is checked in the frontend, needs to be re-checked in the backend anyway, because you cannot trust the frontend, because it is under control of the browser/user.

Electron is quite bad on memory usage because it carries its own v8 environment on top of its own browser platform on top of using _another_ v8 environment for the nodejs part.

Tauri and Wails just use the one available in the OS (UIWebKit in macos, WebView2 in windows), it is also why they load so fast, you probably already have the heavy part loaded in memory. And, of course, brings a tiny statically linked binary instead of running on top of a massive runtime.

I once ran into a bug where our server code would crash only on a specific version of the Linux Kernel under a specific version of the OpenJDK that our client had. At least it would crash at startup but it was some good 2 weeks of troubleshooting because we couldn't change the target environment we were deploying on.

At least it crashed at startup, if it was random it would have been hell.

People who work on really obscure things love to talk about their work, heck if someone would listen to me I could talk for hours about what I do.

Unfortunately very few people care about the minutia of making a behemoth system work.

As I have gotten older, I have grown immense respect for older people who can geek out over stuff.

It’s so easy to be cynical and not care about anything, I am certainly guilty of that. Older people who have found things that they can truly geek out about for hours are relatively rare and some of my favorite people as a result (and part of the reason that I like going to conferences).

I like my coworkers and they’re certainly not anti-intellectual or anything, but there’s only so long I can ramble on about TLA+ or Isabelle or Alloy before they lose interest. It’s not a fault on them at all, there are plenty of topics I am not interested in.

It seems a common problem in our profession that you can’t really talk to anybody about what you are doing. My friends have a vague idea but that’s it.

I would be more than interested to listen to you and what you do. Do not hesitate to share (blog post, AskHN, ShowHN, ...)

I would. Heck, I bet half of HN would be interested in what kind of insanity lies under those behemoths.

I work with music streaming, it is mostly just a lot of really banal business rules that become an entangled web of convoluted if statements. Where to show a single button might mean hitting 5 different microservices and checking 10 different booleans

Doesn't this make the game use double the memory for a while?

Or like the EU won't change their stance on the matter...

Is this a codeword for "not contractor"? I heard that at google contractors are second class citizens.

>at google contractors are second class citizens

This is the case at many companies to avoid contractors being considered employees.

Yes, but that is usually more relating to pay/benefits. At google (from what I heard) contractors are put on the bad projects, maintenance work or support functions. As in there is a big separation between work done by full-time employees and contractors in most teams.

I think FTE is mostly used as a 'unit'. E.g. if two people work on something 50% of the time, you get one "FTE-equivalent", as there is roughly one full-time employee of effort put in.

Though in this context it just seems to be the number of people working on the code on a consistent basis.

FTE can mean either:

* “Full Time Employee” (which can itself mean “not a part-timer” in a place that employs both, or “not a temp/contractor” [in which case the “full-time” really means “regular/permanent”]) or

* “Full Time Equivalent” (a budgeting unit equal to either a full time worker or a combination of part time workers with the same aggregate [usually weekly] hours as constitute the standard for full-time in the system being used.)

Yeah, 1 FTE just equals 40 work-hours.

Brazilian person here, when I moved to Europe I was baffled I couldn't find shops that fixed electronics. Like I wanted to get my Android phone charging port replaced, I literally couldn't find a shop in my city willing to do the repair.

I eventually went back to Brazil and had it fixed there and replaced the battery. Freaking phone lasted 8 years on my very clumsly hands, still works even. The fix cost me ~30 usd plus the battery cost.

Somebody who has the skills to fix electronics will be working with fixing devices which are much more expensive and critical than cell phones.

Industrial dishwasher breaks down? You need to get an electrician there ASAP.

Cell phone breaks down? Throw it away and buy a new one.

Brazil has very low salaries for skilled workers, so it makes sense that it's cheap to find somebody to fix your phone.

Note that mobile phone repair is the no. 1 service provided by repair shops in rural areas of many countries in Africa.

Like 50%+ of all repairs are mobile phone repairs

Yes, it's something extremely valuable, an expensive portable, and the new models all just keep getting worse and worse. There's no reason not to fix them.

It's also a repair that demands some amount of training. I imagine people fix a lot of things without getting them to a shop.

Hackers are down voting my comment. My question to them: If you could get paid twice the salary per hour to repair expensive machines, would you spend your time repairing mobile phones?

Everybody wants that juicy, juicy cheap labour, but nobody wants to be the cheap worker.

Do you think US people capable of fixing phones make more than the ~$600/hour they can add in value by fixing phones there?

No. Fixing modern phones requires a lot of specialized equipment.

You need to be able to fix microscopic flaws in soldering.

There are locked-down components that you cannot replace.

Here is a referenece: https://www.ipadrehab.com/index.cfm?Page=About

If nobody is offering cell phone repair services, that means repairing cell phones is not profitable enough compared to other things the person can do with their time. Otherwise people would offer these services.

Two economists were walking when they spotted a $100 bill. One asked the other "should one of us pick it up?", the other replied "no, if there was a $100 bill there, somebody would have picked it up already", so they kept walking.

Not even the joke is funny. People repeating it seriously is even less so.

Anyway, you would be right if you are trying to claim that the repairmen isn't the party maintaining the irrational situation, so they are powerless to fix it.

Then put your money where your mouth is and open as many cell phone repair shops in Europe as you please. You can mortgage your house and borrow a bunch of money if you need to get started.

But I think that there is always some reason or another why nobody is offering a service which seems to have great demand among customers.

No, it's extremely easy and routine to fix cell phones. You could train teenagers to do it.

And you can train those teenagers to do things which are much more profitable. If they have the dexterity and other skills needed to work on cell phone electronics, then they can work on other electronics.

If it was a good business, then there would be cell phone repair shops on every corner in Europe, like you have in other parts of the world where that makes sense.

Edge market share has grown a lot in the past few years.