We won't know because all we have is one glib comment from one person, but I took the comment on face value. I've definitely met the class of developer who is mainly interested in pointing out problems and a stick in the mud, and isnt interested in working together on solutions.

Yeah, but what are the odds of Uber having hired a whole raft of that class of dev?

They're fairly common, and any specific environment attracts those who favor that environment.

I think reasonably high!!!!

Yeah it’s kind of bizarre that after writing everything leading up to that, the author would still frame the ObjC folks in that way. Like, this or that eng. was so brilliant with their hack, but all those obj-c eng. who advocated boring but stable solutions all along were just curmudgeons with no helpful advice.

The problem from the author's perspective is that the Obj-C "curmudgeons" were proving the right solution to save the app (drop Swift and cut losses + go back to a functioning language) but not the careers of the people who had gotten them into this terrible situation.

This perspective is reflexive. The "ObjC curmudgeons" didn't feel like the adventures that the "Swift zealots" were generating helped their careers in any way.

Sounded like a "both sides" analysis, where the assumption is that both sides in a disagreement must share blame.

The Middle Ground Fallacy

It's the developer equivalent of "support the troops or get out of the way!"

Don't ask why, just do or die.

But yeah, I would have been pissed off if I was put in this situation by myopic upper management.

In my experience, the problem with scenarios like fight the ObjC folks in the story is that the "curmudgeons" don't see the need for anything to change. Their arguments are not "We should use ObjC and do X, Y, and Z to make sure the problems are fixed," but rather usually turn out to be something like "We should use ObjC (and throw out the rewrite entirely; everything was fine before)." Which at best only results in kicking the problem down the street a ways and at worst is not possible.

Indeed the ObjC people were right (I was one of them). But there is nothing more useless than standing in the corner and saying “I told you so”. That’s the curmudgeon.

The emphasis could be on their behavior of 'complaining without providing much in the way of solutions'. Certainly, though obvious now, they could have empirically presented at least one legitimate case as to why Obj-C was a better choice (app size).

Being right isn't enough. You need to be able to convince people of the fact that you're right.

Maybe as a junior engineer, or an intermediate one. But not beyond that. Seniority isn't just being right more often.

Wasn't really clear what benefit the rewrite offered anyway other than a new UI, which brought it's own problems and couldn't that have just been written in Obj-C?

I think he said developer productivity.