Alex RussellFeb 5, 2023

Yet another team at work staring down months of remediation thanks to "modern frontend" has caused me to write down why I've been *intensely* frustrated with the clearly broken market for web technology over our long lost decade:

https://infrequently.org/2023/02/the-market-for-lemons/

Thanks to @brucelawson, @heydon, Taylor Hunt, @andy, and @phae for spotting errors in (even more splenetic) drafts.

The Market for Lemons

New web services are being built to a self-defeatingly low UX and performance standard, and existing experiences are now pervasively re-developed on unspeakably slow, JS-taxed stacks. At a business level, this is a disaster, raising the question: why are new teams buying into stacks that have failed so often before?

Alex Russell
Show threadNikki Massaro

@slightlyoff circa 2016 I had moved from a dev team to a UX/a11y one in the same organization. The organization decided to borrow developers from an internal department that did one-off boutique sites for our organization that did hundreds of online course sites.

The developer on loan was a young framework bro, and all we needed were some features added to our existing JS with progressive enhancement. I took time to show him the specs—he told me, “I probably won’t use any of this.”

Feb 5, 2023 at 2:23pmWeb
Show threadNikki MassaroFeb 5, 2023
@slightlyoff I reminded him that whatever he wrote needed to be accessible. “We didn’t need to be accessible at my old job, [name drop cable company people love to hate]. I pointed him to our a11y expert, but he kept trying to find another internal expert who would under 40 and less female.
Show threadNikki MassaroFeb 5, 2023
@slightlyoff as I was warning management about these red flags and not seeing and change of course, he was touting his preferred framework as the way things are done.
Show threadNikki MassaroFeb 5, 2023
@slightlyoff because he refused to believe accessibility would be hard and that he should work with the experts and because he hadn’t focused on the fundamentals of HTML, CSS, and vanilla JS, his efforts failed our testing again and again.
Show threadNikki MassaroFeb 5, 2023
@slightlyoff his projects were months overdue with nothing to show, requests were piling up. I offered to step in and do the projects that hadn’t even started but in the meantime someone covering for this guy told mgmt my code didn’t meet modern standards.
Show threadNikki MassaroFeb 5, 2023

@slightlyoff I left that place with shaken confidence, a mistrust of framework bros, and a belief that a11y can’t just exist in a vacuum separate from development.

That developer left the org before any of his projects were due. The person who lied to sideline me is also long gone. That department hasn’t built anything new since 2016. They are still using the stuff I made a decade which looks extremely dated but still works.

Show threadNikki MassaroFeb 5, 2023
@slightlyoff all this to say that the sidelining we all experienced was real, and it has lasting effects.
Show threadPaul MasonFeb 5, 2023
@nikkimk @slightlyoff That sounds familiar - stuff I wrote over 20 years ago is still going strong because the replacements (many) just didn't cut it. But I still threw in the towel because I got tired of JavaScript developers who knew absolutely nothing about HTML, CSS and UX; and refused to learn.
Show threadNikki MassaroFeb 5, 2023
@paulhmason @slightlyoff I’m actually a bit embarrassed that what I wrote back then is still live. It’s like flipping through an old yearbook and cringing at your old hairstyle. When I interviewed at the department I left them for I told them, “I built a mullet.”