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Re:Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software s... by ajmurmann on Thursday July 16, 2020 @12:06PM (#23860369)
Think about the requirements for market success of the different pieces of software. Games most run fast and any performance you safe can go back into better graphics. Performance is crucial. Electron is hugely successful despite not being very performant.

Developers love thinking about performance. It's fun and asked us to use so many of our skills. However, for many products other quality aspects are more important, like maintainability, extendability and expediency of development.

That performance often falls by the wayside on terms of business priorities ends up being reflected in the typical developer skill set.

Re:Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software s... by bananaface on Thursday July 16, 2020 @01:17PM (#23861213)
I don't know if I agree. Its plausible, but also these businesses are monopolies, so even if they churn out shit it doesn't undermine their market position.

But I think Electron in particular is a symptom of the fact that GUI frameworks are in general horrible. There was a market gap for usability because using everything else was obtuse, and now we're paying for it.

Re:Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software s... by aprdm on Thursday July 16, 2020 @02:08PM (#23861895)
Which businesses are monopolies? Slack surely isn't. If there's a market for faster chat clients because that's what people want then looks like a business opportunity?

FWIW all of slack competitors are also electron (rocket.chat et all), so it seems like you possibly know something that other engineers don't and might have a competitive advantage!

Re:Tech sector job interviews assess anxiety, not software s... by bananaface on Friday July 17, 2020 @05:26AM (#23868794)
Google is a monopoly.

If someone released a GPU-accelerated version of Electron that had the performance of the GUI in basically every video game, it would destroy Electron. Now, would it be popular? I'm not sure, but let's say the answer is no. Ok, now imagine Google released that.