[bmeski]

I work on a massive CMS and he’s correct. There is an insane groupthink going on in webdev.

Another team in my org has spent a year reinventing our client side js so that our templates are now mixed with the svelte runtime. All to render/update cards on the page that can update when an api pings the page.

So 6 months later they’re still building the svelte integration and have only shipped 2 pages to users.

This is a cms where you should be able to create any page via a combination of SSR components but no, now it’s a mix of SSR, SSR svelte within handlebars, and client side svelte. So the edit ui is now a fragmented mess of parts of the page that can and can’t render, ruining the default model of the cms all because they couldn’t bear to write vanilla js. They also added react the year before and now it just sits there decaying.

Literally madness.

[resonious]

I'm not sure if this one org making a mess is good evidence that there is groupthink occurring in the entire industry. There are places that are using these frameworks well, and it really does improve productivity.

[pjmlp]

I know the feeling, specially bad now with the headless CMS fashion.

[mschuster91]

Reducing your website to something that can essentially be served straight out of s3 buckets + lambda functions for the few interactive elements your site has (e.g. newsletter subscription, contact form) will reduce your hosting bill and attack surface, but increase operational complexity.

The key thing behind the "headless CMS" fashion is that most people severely overestimate the amount of cost reduction and underestimate the impact of something breaking down in the backend side as well as the engineering cost.

[pjmlp]

I guess DevOps also need jobs, when I compare team sizes between both approaches.

[mschuster91]

As if "devops" were a job... at most companies the sad reality is that the ops team gets fired and the developers who often enough don't even have more understanding of a Linux shell than ls/cd/cat/rm get told "you're also doing ops now, have fun!".

Inevitably, issues will plop up - hacks, data loss, site going down over the weekend because there's no 24/7 on-call any more - and then management comes down to the devs and whines "what's the cause of problem X"... and fires the rest when they say "we're developers, not SREs and server administrators".

[pjmlp]

It is, at most companies it is just Systems Engineer rebranded.

[sergiomattei]

That's not evidence of groupthink in an industry, that's just an org making absurd engineering decisions.

[beebmam]

I might find your argument more persuasive if you didn't use such extreme language.

[bmeski]

If you think that is extreme language something is horribly wrong.

[gmfawcett]

Well, you did refer to "vanilla JS" without a trigger warning. :P