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Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

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Re: Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

#121

Post by yesimahuman »

xtracto wrote: post #103
samwillis wrote: post #37

I want to throw Ionic and Capacitor (or any other webview based toolkit with your favourite SPA framework) into this mix, I believe for a lot of apps its probably a better option than either Flutter or React Native. I also don't and believe in "one true cross platform toolkit", each has its place. So: Hiring - The OP suggests React Native has a larger pool of developers than Flutter, very true. But Ionic/Capacitor/et…

The last time I developed in Ionic, I stumbled into problems when actually trying to DO things in the mobile platforms: Want to use the camera? you are limited to whatever "plugin" is available. Want to read from SSD ? you also have to integrate some plugin and pray that it works for your use case. To me, it feels that Ionic is only good for the "minimum common denominator" of apps (a webpage, maaaybe with some stora…

I don't think this is fair. In Capacitor/Ionic yuou have full native access and adding a bit of native code to accomplish something if there isn't a plugin available is much easier now that we use Capacitor instead of Cordova. React Native and Flutter also have the same dynamic that, if you only want to use plugins to accomplish functionality, you have to find and use the ones the community created and hope they continue to create more and maintain them. We've made big strides there with the Capacitor Community effort and also directly supporting a number of plugins ourselves.

On the "for profit" side, I see this as an advantage. We try to only charge for things that are cloud and have natural cost, or that really only enterprises need. We deliberately keep the vast majority of our platform free and open source. The fact that we generate revenue from enterprise customers is actually awesome for our projects because we are directly incentivized to improve them!

We aren't merely an advertising-driven business that creates open source for other reasons (hiring, internal use, etc), but we are literally in the business of mobile technology. If you're a big company, you can actually call us or use one of our integrations that we directly support and you can file tickets against and have an SLA, and our cloud services integrate with your existing enterprise CI/CD infrastructure. Think about Facebook ever doing this! It's a unique offering in this space that our customers really love and directly benefits our OSS work.

Finally, on our docs, there is certainly room for improvement, but we often hear the opposite: that we have some of the best docs around for OSS projects!

Re: Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

#122

Post by evan_ »

a4isms wrote: post #64
evan_ wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you just fall through a time portal from 2008? JavaScript hasn't been the exclusive domain of "script kiddies" for a loooong time.

What's very interesting about your comment is this: Let's say that JavaScrip was a language for "kiddies" in 2008. Let's call them people in the age group 17-22. That was fourteen years ago, and those "kiddies" are now 31-36. In 2008, they were in entry-level positions. Today, they have over a decade of industry experience and are lead engineers, engineering managers, &c. It's not like they "grew up and switched to a…

I kinda got the year wrong, 1998 would've been a better thing to say. I was working on multiple shipping products using JavaScript in 2008.

Re: Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

#123

Post by native_samples »

bseidensticker wrote: post #116
native_samples wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google is not at all a reasonable proxy for the rest of the industry. It has an almost entirely parallel infrastructure that bears little resemblence to what everyone else learns and uses. Google has notoriously high training times for this reason and always did.

I realize that, but 1 month vs 6 months? It's not just that the infrastructure is all different, ramping up on a codebase is extremely time consuming itself. You're going to have that at any other large tech company. If it's a tiny startup on mostly greenfield stuff then sure, but that's also not a reasonable proxy for the rest of the industry.

Trust me, Google is just weird. I used to work there. When I joined SRE it took 3 months for me to be able to do anything useful at all, and another three months after that before I was really able to function on my own without needing to constantly look things up or ask for help.

After Google I joined a startup where I built two new products from scratch, including hiring most of the team myself. On boarding time was about a week and that included learning a new programming language from scratch (Kotlin, which is in fairness, easy to learn). This remained true true even after several years where the codebase had become quite large. On-boarding time never really changed for programmers of equivalent skill.

Ramp-up time in most normal businesses and most normal codebases is measured in weeks, not six months.

Re: Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

#124

Post by Benjammer »

jarjoura wrote: post #101
onion2k wrote: post #24

This article highlights one of the things that really bugs me about tech hiring. The availability of developers who know a language or tech isn't a limiting factor if you're willing to hire people and give them the time to learn. Yes, it's expensive, but if there really are productivity benefits from using a particular tool then you should end up better off in the long term anyway. The expectation that another compan…

Counterpoint, I made a recent shift to Android from many many years of iOS development. It's not the language that I struggled with, it was the completely different engineering culture surrounding the platform. Yes there are many similarities, things like concerns for battery life and thoughtful network usage. However, that's where the similarities end. The APIs and appropriate architecture decisions are completely d…

I think the key point from the OP you're missing here is mentorship/training to avoid all of the issues you described. I don't think the OP was advocating for hiring the best generalist you can find and then just throwing them to the wolves and expecting senior-level productivity.

Re: Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

#125

Post by native_samples »

BaseballPhysics wrote: post #115
native_samples wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the assumption behind the post you're replying to is that this will happen regardless of what you are paying them, that is, there is no actual stable "market rate" that can be precisely targeted. It may seem this cannot happen, but in a system experiencing rapid inflation it's what you'd expect to see. This doesn't have to be on a macro level. The endless tide of VC + crypto funds have created a form of (hype…

> I think the assumption behind the post you're replying to is that this will happen regardless of what you are paying them, that is, there is no actual stable "market rate" that can be precisely targeted. > The endless tide of VC + crypto funds have created a form of (hyper?) inflation inside the tech industry in which wages are spiralling upwards without any fundamental link to increased value. It's simply a biddin…

"Buyers are willing to pay for labour at the clearing price based on their assessment of cost-vs-benefit."

If you're competing against firms like Google or startups that just raised unicorn funding, and these days everyone is, then the people bidding in the market or labor are not doing cost benefit analysis. They just need to hire. They have the money, they need to hire and they're going to do it no matter what the price ends up being because that's just what they do. Whether the hires actually generate more value than they're costing is only rarely assessed because the money won't dry up anytime soon.

Additionally, market rates are an abstraction. Consider a simplified example where you have 3 people who need to buy a chicken. They're all starving so they need the chicken or else they die. First person bids $1. Second person says, I'll pay $2. Third person says no wait, wait, I'll pay $3. First person says, I'll bid $4.

This loop ends when only one of the people can still pay and everyone else starves. It does not end when the price has reached some a-priori knowable "market rate" that you could go out and measure ahead of time. To the people actually in the market, they have limited information and don't know what the bidding limit is for the other players, and thus to them it can appear that regardless of what price they bid, they are always beaten by 20%.

In a properly functioning liquid market in which nobody has access to printed money, this cycle is supposed to reach an equilibrium fairly quickly with supply catching up to counterbalance demand. In the actual software market there's been a fairly direct flow from quantitative easing and crypto directly into employers, as well as the yearly 20% revenue bump Google always seems to achieve, so some participants have effectively "unlimited" money. It doesn't make sense to talk about a clearing price in that situation. From the perspective of any normal business that gets money from customers, they will always lose.

Re: Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

#126

Post by jbaudanza »

jdmg94 wrote: post #102
jbaudanza wrote: post #67

I've been using react native heavily for the past 18 months. Because there's no JIT, Javascript is slow on mobile, especially on Android. I spend a lot of my creative energy trying to optimize the render function. I often times wonder if I should have chosen Flutter instead. Each framework has its bullshit you don't discover until it's too late. So, I'm sure if I had chosen Flutter I'd be complaining about something…

Memoizing everything might be hurting more than helping your apps performance. I’ve built a few different apps with RN, the issues here might be specific to this project

I know this is theoretically true, but I've never found this to be the case in practice.

Coinbase, in fact, has made it a rule that all things must be put in useMemo. https://attardi.org/why-we-memo-all-the-things/

Facebook is working on an experimental compiler called React Forget that will transparently memoize everything for you.

https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/rcn5ks/react_forge...

Re: Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

#127

Post by nouveaux »

ozim wrote: post #77
onion2k wrote: post #24

This article highlights one of the things that really bugs me about tech hiring. The availability of developers who know a language or tech isn't a limiting factor if you're willing to hire people and give them the time to learn. Yes, it's expensive, but if there really are productivity benefits from using a particular tool then you should end up better off in the long term anyway. The expectation that another compan…

I would like to take different point of view. Developers also switch jobs to get more salary and market themselves as specialists in a specific stack. I yet have to see developer taking pay cut to retrain in a different tech. Companies already have to factor in training of people on their company specific stuff. That is why no one expects new hire to be fully productive in first 3-6 months. Even if you know JavaScrip…

"I yet have to see developer taking pay cut to retrain in a different tech."

I'd argue that most tech just does not take that long to train in. If I am proficient developer that knows Postgres, how long is it really going to take me to be productive with Mongo?

This is very different compared to say a web developer moving to robotics. I would take a pay cut for that because the knowledge gap is so wide.

Re: Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

#128

Post by BaseballPhysics »

native_samples wrote: post #125
BaseballPhysics wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think the assumption behind the post you're replying to is that this will happen regardless of what you are paying them, that is, there is no actual stable "market rate" that can be precisely targeted. > The endless tide of VC + crypto funds have created a form of (hyper?) inflation inside the tech industry in which wages are spiralling upwards without any fundamental link to increased value. It's simply a biddin…

"Buyers are willing to pay for labour at the clearing price based on their assessment of cost-vs-benefit." If you're competing against firms like Google or startups that just raised unicorn funding, and these days everyone is, then the people bidding in the market or labor are not doing cost benefit analysis. They just need to hire. They have the money, they need to hire and they're going to do it no matter what the…

> If you're competing against firms like Google or startups that just raised unicorn funding, and these days everyone is, then the people bidding in the market or labor are not doing cost benefit analysis. They just need to hire.

That is a cost-benefit analysis.

They've received funding, they have a business model, now they need labour.

It seems to me your real gripe is that there's a large amount of investment flowing into Silicon Valley and you don't believe that should be happening.

> This loop ends when only one of the people can still pay and everyone else starves.

That's right. And that means, in the valley in particular, some companies will never get off the ground because they can't afford the price for labour.

The solution is simple: hire in a different labour market.

> To the people actually in the market, they have limited information and don't know what the bidding limit is for the other players, and thus to them it can appear that regardless of what price they bid, they are always beaten by 20%.

Sure, that's called incomplete information, and it's a feature of virtually all markets, minus open and instantly traded markets like stock exchanges.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, here, other than to complain about a general feature of capitalism that (in a refreshing change of pace) happens to be working in favour of labour.

> In a properly functioning liquid market in which nobody has access to printed money

And now we get to the political axe you're grinding.

Look, the SV labour market has been explosively expensive for 20-30 years. This isn't a new phenomenon by any stretch, and it certainly pre-dates the 2008 financial crisis and the low interest rate environment that followed. There's a reason outsourcing became so popular throughout the early 2000s.

The problem is that tech companies failed to expand their labour pool beyond a few tight markets, either by opening offices in other locations or supporting remote workers. That's their choice, but don't complain when labour prices go up as a consequence.

Re: Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

#129

Post by dzikimarian »

BaseballPhysics wrote: post #120
dzikimarian wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and then once they acquired that skillset you failed to adjust their salary accordingly. Or your budget took a hit due to half year gap in delivery, caused by boot camp you conducted and then bigger company snatches your team, while you have no way to react.

If you need a half year to train up a developer to a reasonable level of productivity, you have a problem. If you need to slip or stop development for a half year because you need to train up a whole new team, you have a whole other problem. If, prior to hiring, you failed to budget for an appropriate market rate reflecting a skilled up staff, you have yet another problem. Honestly, at what point can we agree the rea…

>If you need to slip or stop development for a half year because you need to train up a whole new team, you have a whole other problem.

Yes, which is why nobody reasonable does that. Which leads us to the original point, that many companies will not be interested in taking risk to introduce flutter.

Re: Flutter is better than React Native in all the ways that don’t matter

#130

Post by sangnoir »

onion2k wrote: post #24

This article highlights one of the things that really bugs me about tech hiring. The availability of developers who know a language or tech isn't a limiting factor if you're willing to hire people and give them the time to learn. Yes, it's expensive, but if there really are productivity benefits from using a particular tool then you should end up better off in the long term anyway. The expectation that another compan…

> Unless companies start hiring to mentor people this will not change

This wont change until SWE stop job-hopping so much. In turn, the job-hopping won't stop until employers stop prioritizing new hire compensation over existing employees...and I don't see how this stops because it's measurably profitable and is self-reinforcing.

On the flip side, as an employee, I like that I can reuse the skills I have, it commoditizes employers and lowers the friction in changing jobs. Knowing what I know about capitalism in practice, employers would love the savings from employee tech lock-in.

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