Users Don’t Care About Your Tech Stack
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In contrast, banks all universally moved to single page apps lately, and every one of them sucks. Some suck more (we don't support you having more than one tab open while you are researching stocks) and some suck less (what is the back button for, anyway? Just ignore it). But they all suck.
And yes, users do care about using shitty stacks when they make shitty results.
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As long as you remember that the cloud is just someone else's computer that they have admin rights on.
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If your users are aware and complaining about your tech stack, you failed as a Dev. The stack had nothing to do with it, its on you.
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They care about your site being compromised or down, and your choice of tech stack has a lot to do with how likely those things will be.
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Do you know why banks are still running COBOL on new, old architecture, IBM mainframes? Sure, it’s in part due to risk aversion, ignorance and inertia. But it’s also because, if in the end the result is the same, then the tech stack doesn’t matter.
I've done extensive consulting for financial firms, including mainframe-replacement projects, and that's not the reason. There are two reasons: banks regard IT as a cost center, so they systematically underinvest. They never budget for lifecyle maintenance, they just kick the can down the road as far as they can. In addition to that, hardly anyone who wrote that COBOL code is still alive, and when it was written in the 1970s or 80s, the requirements and design were seldom documented, and after decades of code maintenance, they're no longer accurate anyway. So to replace that COBOL, you have to reverse-engineer the whole business process and the app that embodies it. And you can't do like-for-like replacement, since a lot of the business process is actually workarounds for the limitations of that legacy system. And it's even worse than that: sometimes that COBOL has some custom IBM 360 assembler behind it, and nobody remembers what that shit does either, and finding people who know that, or CICS, or the quirks of ancient DB/2 versions, is even harder than finding someone skillful who can write COBOL. So until there are new requirements, usually new regulations that cannot be weaseled out of, they let that sleeping dog lie.
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every one of them sucks
They went to the cheapest bidders, and those poor devs in Chennai have no fucking clue about proper UX design.
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I would say, it’s them caring about the product and their needs, rather than the underlying stack.
That's the idealistic fairy tale that only the most fatuous of UX people believe. But anyone who looks at any process closely enough will soon realize that a system's stakeholders often have objectives that are in conflict with each other. It's not all about the users, it's about low operations cost, it's about collecting and selling data on user behavior, it's about minimizing support costs, improving monetization, up-selling, cross-selling, and a number of other things the users neither want nor need. And that is the root cause of enshittification.
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OK, now take that to the next step: what do you do when optimizing ease of implementation and support limits the user needs that can be met? How do you decide which objective is higher priority?
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The underinvestment is absolutely on-point. Very few banks see them as a platform business and think that their banks can do deals on excel sheets
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Most if not all prefer a particular tech stack based on how familiar they are with the ecosystem around it, not because of ego as most think. I would never prefer PHP based tech stack. Why? Because I have like 0 idea of that particular ecosystem.
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I also worked on finance tech once. I agree with all you said, but the point is that a fancy sales pitch about a new bleeding edge server tech stack is not gonna change any of that because the customer doesn't care about the same things that developers care about.