Sysadmins used to know a lot but earn pittance compared to “devops” or “SRE”; then those more expensive folks outsourced the majority of their hard work to cloud vendors who charge 5-11x the cost for compute.
Developers earn 5-10x more than 15 years ago, yet continue to choose solutions for their own convenience and time saving. Stating that its better for the company if they have to work less.
Surely at some point its just your job to consider the entire ecosystem and your contribution to it.
Otherwise why are you worth all that money?
Seriously.
I don't know why engineers manufacture worlds in which there is complex rational to explain how money goes from one pocket to another. Life isn't remotely sensible despite all our efforts to put on that thin veneer.
And more than that - if you have a team that only/mostly has web experience, they're going to use Electron, and... what kind of company would want them to stop and go learn native app development, or hire extra people just to get a native app?
Note: I fully agree with you, I do feel that as a profession we really have descended into a weird "ship the MVP, ship new features non-stop, forget quality" reality, and I dislike it. I'd love it if everything was resource-thrifty native apps, and dev teams could stop chasing new and shiny things and work on improving their existing apps until they were shiny polished diamonds. I'd love to point to an app and say "see? this is 20 years of development, look at how nice it is, how perfectly thought out everything is, how everything just works flawlessly".
But the fact that that's not happening is not because devs are lazy, or not worth their money. It just doesn't make business sense.
Salary for developers that we discuss on HN seems to be in the region of $250k base, but that's not factoring in TC- which seems to be the bulk of income for the last 5 years. It's not unheard of around here to hear people talking about pulling in half-million if they are ex-FAANG. Which is nearly everybody these days.
[0]: source is here: https://www.datamation.com/careers/developer-salary-levels-2... based on https://e-janco.com
This is why performance matters even with a machine that is mostly idle. A faster system will respond faster to events. It will have lower latency when communicating over a network. It will handle user inputs faster. Users will complain that a program takes a second to respond even if the load average is 0.01.
(I know CPUs enter lower-performance states when lightly loaded. They can go from idle to their highest performance state in much less time than it takes for the user to notice latency.)
Subjectively, every Electron app I’ve used including the local beloved VSCode has been a painful UX. I can always tell. Nothing makes a fast computer feel slow quite like them, it’s amazing. I would settle for React Native at this point.
I do remember. And it now takes A LOT longer on insanely fast CPUs and SSDs. And I hate it every time I have to wait for it.
I think most software is designed to load once and never be quit; you’re probably just supposed to leave photosnot running in the background and let it swap to disk if needed.
But I have a hard time running like that, I quit programs when I’m done using them.
Inefficiency sucks, and electron enables that on a large scale.
I have to assume that photoshop could start faster, but trade offs would be made.
So whether their productivity app is written in Electron or hand-crafted assembler isn't going to make much of a difference to the end user experience.
Electron and similar apps serve a legitimate purpose in the marketplace which is to allow developers to deliver a cross-platform app for the same cost as a single platform one.