The only important question is whether this is a technology problem or a business problem. Fundamentally the problem is this:
Web developers don't know what they are doing and oversell their capabilities.
To be more clear though, this isn't a new problem, just that the symptoms of the problem have changed as the tools have evolved. I remember starting at Travelocity in 2007 and they sure as shit didn't know what they were doing either. All the JavaScript developers there, except for 1 (so about 6 of them) were spun off onto a special project that never made it to production. There was 1 guy left to write JavaScript for the rest of the site in a company who only real product was a website and employed 3500 people. All the other developers were Java people. Most of those guys were scared shitless of web technologies. There were a few Java developers who had a solid working knowledge of CSS and JavaScript but worked extraordinarily hard to keep that a secret.
That was a big WTF, but then I discovered it was also the same at both Expedia, Orbitz, and Southwest.
Now people really, and I am not being figurative, expect Angular and React to do their jobs for them from solving technical problems to telling them exact what products to build.
Worse still is when you point out the incompetence that so clear to everybody else the developers doing the work get angry. I mean hostile out to stab in you the back angry. The non-developers see the dysfunction and have absolutely no idea how to manage it or solve for it. Sometimes the dysfunction is so pronounced that it leads to inter-department warfare within the company, as was the case in one of those previously named travel companies (not Travelocity).
Here I am 13 years later working on the web that is now a 30 year old platform (20 years old if you count the modern standard web), and its still the same shit show. How have businesses allowed such cancer to prosper?
What you describe as "broken" is what I imagine to be the ideal situation.
I expect travel agencies and similar websites to have a rock-solid back-end, and I don't care at all for any Javascript fanciness. In fact I would expect their websites to work with JS disabled.
The fact they canned whatever special project the JS developers were working on might have been the right decision (and I just checked, Travelocity is still in business).
> I expect travel agencies and similar websites to have a rock-solid back-end
They had no such thing. Sometimes their shopping carts were so horribly incompetent it’s amazing we generated any revenue at all. Pretty bad since they had no idea just how broke it was until investing in something like Tealeaf.
Web developers don't know what they are doing and oversell their capabilities.
To be more clear though, this isn't a new problem, just that the symptoms of the problem have changed as the tools have evolved. I remember starting at Travelocity in 2007 and they sure as shit didn't know what they were doing either. All the JavaScript developers there, except for 1 (so about 6 of them) were spun off onto a special project that never made it to production. There was 1 guy left to write JavaScript for the rest of the site in a company who only real product was a website and employed 3500 people. All the other developers were Java people. Most of those guys were scared shitless of web technologies. There were a few Java developers who had a solid working knowledge of CSS and JavaScript but worked extraordinarily hard to keep that a secret.
That was a big WTF, but then I discovered it was also the same at both Expedia, Orbitz, and Southwest.
Now people really, and I am not being figurative, expect Angular and React to do their jobs for them from solving technical problems to telling them exact what products to build.
Worse still is when you point out the incompetence that so clear to everybody else the developers doing the work get angry. I mean hostile out to stab in you the back angry. The non-developers see the dysfunction and have absolutely no idea how to manage it or solve for it. Sometimes the dysfunction is so pronounced that it leads to inter-department warfare within the company, as was the case in one of those previously named travel companies (not Travelocity).
Here I am 13 years later working on the web that is now a 30 year old platform (20 years old if you count the modern standard web), and its still the same shit show. How have businesses allowed such cancer to prosper?