[the_other]

As a career front-end developer, I take affront at this. I have never argued in favour of any of the shit people face on the web on a daily basis. I’m close to wanting to get out of the industry because the product is so toxic these days. The people are largely great, I love my current team.. but every month we’re told to add more tracking, or advertising (from Google of all people). I could leave out of political differences but where am I gonna go that’s different (in London)?

Biz: we need to track our users, stick GA on it Me: we could do a privacy-friendly alternative which brings the data in-house. It would lower our lower our GDPR burden so our cookie notices would be simpler, and at the same time make it easier to link our user data with other metrics (I work in streaming video at the moment) Biz: GA is free Me: Longer term, out overall cost of development will be lower because the complexity will be lower, and you wont be leaking data about your customers Biz: but GA is free and works out of the box with more analysis than we’d use Me: Do you see how that actually makes it more complex, over-engineered and unfit for OUR purposes? It’s also a dog to use by the data people and they will ask for a different tool because they can’t change GA Biz: it’s free. The deadline is three weeks.

BIZ: we want to make more money so we’ll sell advertising Me: Ok, but content-based advertising would guve us more control over what we get linked with, doesn’t track users, lets us set our own pricing, lets us sync better with our own content (because presumably we’d be able to control the manifests better Biz: but GA gives us an admin panel and we don’t have to think about it Me: but the integration will take months and half of it’s out of our hands be ause Third Party Biz: here’s the admin key they gave us…

(Ok, so I didn’t actually have these conversations and TBH I only learned the detail of sharing manifests with a third party after I joined the team.. but you get the idea).

[noasaservice]

Dont take a critique of the job title as a slight against you personally. We, frankly, don't know you.

And as a whole industry, front-end devs have implemented atrocious dark patterns and all manners of disgusting anti-user choices. Have you? Only you can answer that - but I sincerely don't care about your personal choices. This discussion was never aimed at "the_other".

[the_other]

Honestly, I knew that it wasn’t meant at me. But I am DEEPLY frustrated at the lack of power I have in these situations.

[selfhoster11]

I understand that you may feel affronted (and apologise for making you feel like that), but I'm actually criticising the web development as an industry and as a set of broad trends, rather than individual developers. Sometimes developers may have leverage, but from my experience in backend dev, that's rarely an option.

[billytetrud]

Start your own company