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Comment by michaelcampbell | Hacker News Reader

> The problem: to achieve the desired level of UX, we needed to convince stakeholders that a single-page-app approach would be needed, including some APIs to fuel them.

I'd wager a SPA is a hammer/nail reaction here.

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At one job I ran into this pretty badly. The team I joined had an internal app that was, basically, a bunch of forms connected to a database. It had a lot of problems -- the data models didn't actually map to what the business needed, the UI was unintuitive. My manager insisted that what we needed to do was rewrite the entire thing as a React SPA. I told him, well, we're just going to end up with the exact same problems, only now implemented in a different framework. This won't solve any of the actual problems. He insisted, though, saying that React was "modern."

Thankfully, the depth of mismanagement here was pretty exceptional in my experience. In most cases, even if I'm personally skeptical of the need for an SPA I can see a reasonable argument in favor. The cartoonish straight out admitting that the sole purpose was to be more "modern" with literally zero regard for actually serving any user needs is thankfully not something I've run across too often.

There are markets where being seen as old-fashioned is fatal, so this might not be irrational. Just because it's internal doesn't mean they're not worried about the wrong people seeing it in an old-fashioned state. People who worry about that (for good reason or not) don't always have a boundary on that concern, and sometimes internals leak.

In fairness, his audience was his manager, not the app's users. So it was perfectly rationale for him to push for the relatively easy re-write instead of worrying about the app's users, given that his manager was not a user of the app. As an engineer who finds value in making things people actually find useful, though, it was a pretty dispiriting experience.

It happens more often than you might think. Rewriting everything seems to be fun/easy to inexperienced developers. It takes lots of scars to realise that nope simply improving what is already somewhat working is usually a much better solution.

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