Comment by lbriner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lbriner | Hacker News Reader

What I find shocking about this, as with many other examples from Meta, Alphabet, Amazon etc. is that many of the complaints are things that small companies justify as "yes, but small team". In other words, our 3 developers don't have the time to refactor this API heavy interface because we are struggling with company growth.

When you have the size and money of Atlassian, that excuse is pathetic. Yeah we have 3000 Developers (or whatever) and we don't have the resources to do good UI design, refactoring away from poor performance etc. I always thought that these companies were the ones who invented "how to do good web apps", but it seems like function over everything and even the functionality is poorly implemented in some cases.

How can anyone think that a simple app that downloads 24MB over 900 connections is OK. What the heck?

I think you're hitting on something there. I think most of those big companies are struggling to provide meaningful changes because they are too big and there is no trust. Trust and actually knowing your sub-ordinates is replaced by tools and metrics. Those tools and metrics then drive exactly the opposite of the behaviour that you would want.

Large companies incentivise behaviour that overall make products worse and customers angry while showing super awesome metrics internally. While I'm sure such metrics are going to be causing some of the right people to get PIP'd and managed out they also disillusion the good people that were trying to do the right thing (or actually did do the right thing) but which didn't show up as the correct number on some dashboard that was used by the CTO and HR to fire the "underperformers".

> I always thought that these companies were the ones who invented "how to do good web apps"

No. These companies were the first to get a critical mass in their respective markets or product categories. then they used that position to smother or buy out competitors and ensure their survival.

There is nothing mythical or extraordinary about what those companies did, just some mediocre people who were in the right place at the right time.

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