While working at reported, I reported the following issue.
Javascript is a privileged language because its programmers can immediately see in a browser how a Javascript program works. Thus the interaction with the browser must be as fast as possible for a Front end engineer to be productive.
Instead, in the 15 people Front end team I was assigned to, this interaction was very slow and cumbersome.
- When I joinded the team, each reload of the page they were working on forced them to close the browser’s currently loaded tab, open a new empty tab, go to the login page of the app, identify with their credentials, navigate through many intermediate pages, and eventually load again the page they were working on.
- Some hours after I voiced my surprise that we had to program that way, the team leader came up with an automatic solution, where the running environment would detect a file change and reload that page only. Notice that he decided to make the reload automatic because he knew how to, not because it was needed (zero effort at doing it manually by pressing the
F5key). - However this cool thing never worked very well, because his implementation of HMR (Hot Module Reload) always left the navigation links broken, making it impossible to load a different page after the current one had been reloaded. Thus, in the end, a reload from login is still used a lot.
- How much money the company wastes is left as an exercise. Consider 1 minute per reload from login, performed 100 times a day by a team of 15 programmers.
Why is the Front end team forced to program like that? Essentially because of the inferiority complex of many designers of that configuration. Instead of building what their team needed, they built what they needed to show how good they were at making cool things. (like optimizing the JavaScript transpiled from TypeScript before showing the application in the browser, which is only useful in production, not in development)