[mistermann]

I agree, but if your coworkers is anything like mine and you asked him if there is a fundamental problem with web development as a platform choice for internal apps, I expect he would suddenly forget all the pain he goes through on a regular basis. I've watched my company burn about a million dollars unnecessarily in the last two years because of choosing a 100% web interface for an entirely internal project (of dubious value in the first place).

The zealotry in this field is getting close to unsustainable in my opinion. Companies thought the proliferation of ms access apps was bad, wait until they try to do something with the proliferation of overarchitected web apps based on a wide assortment of fashionable at the time but now unpopular languages and frameworks that hardly anyone has experience on and is most certainly not interested in working on.

[gaius]

The frameworks are the problem. There is no such thing as a "JavaScript guy" really, everything is about the framework, every app is some dev's first in that framework before it drops out of fashion, and knowing framework X doesn't give you any leg up onto framework Y. Experience counts for nothing.

In the old days, you could learn C or SQL and for every hour of learning get a hundred or a thousand hours of real use, and you have at least a fighting chance of picking up some other guys code, or vice versa.

[mistermann]

I couldn't agree more. I really don't think very many people in management understand how the programming world has changed and what is happening at a code level in their companies and how big of a maintenance problem they are going to have on their hands.