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Comment by applfanboysbgon | Hacker News Reader

> It makes me wonder why did large companies are investing so much in web and putting web devs to write disk utility desktop apps?

It's because in these environments where corporate cancer has metastasised, programmers are not in charge of hiring programmers, or much of anything when it comes to decision-making really. HR is composed of people who are not programmers. They are looking to hire people with a list of shiny hot new web stack keywords on a resume, because they have literally no other concept of how to filter candidate applications. So they end up with a bunch of hot React devs and nobody capable of making software that is fit for task.

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I don't follow - why do you think HR would be interested in shiny hot new web stack keywords over anything else?

To a non-developer, every application they read might as well be a list of buzzwords. They cannot comprehend a word of it. Web stacks offer the opportunity to list more and newer buzzwords. Do I set up an interview with the person who lists "C systems programmer" or with the person who is a "full stack React, Tailwind, Next.js, Node.js, Electron, Docker, Kubernetes, AWS engineer seasoned in Javascript, Typescript, HTML, and CSS"? Well, the latter certainly sounds 10x more impressive. Into the trashbin the systems programmer application goes, they just don't have enough skills for an enterprise of our scale!

A C systems programmer can definitely make a list of buzzwords as well.

Also, let's say team A (10 C app/systems programmers) in a company asks HR to look for a C developer and HR comes back to them with 10 great web developers to be grilled by the engineers of team A - what happens then? Does team A shrug and say "welcome to our C codebase, we shall now rewrite it in tailwind or whatever because you are now here!" - I really don't see how it can play out

This supposes team A has 10 C programmers in the first place. By one means or another, teams of web developers are put together and made to do non-web-development projects, and now half of the Windows 11 userland is written in fucking React. I'm not the one making these stupid decisions, but probably they were originally hired to work on a web project, then later moved to a new OS-related project because they were the pool of idle employees available, and the fleet of React-in-the-OS programmers expanded as new hires were now being funneled directly into React teams working on OS projects.

Because they lack any better signals from within the company. At several places I have worked, hiring is almost fully detached from the groups that need the workers. They never could find good candidates for our teams. This kind of disconnect is what corporate cancer looks like, and it is endemic in big business.

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