In today’s episode, we bring Spiro Floropoulos, a senior developer and architect with over 20 years of experience. This episode is an unusual one, as Spiro recently got laid off due to a bizarre chain of events that involved HTMX, overworking, and technical debt.

But we’ll learn from this story, as we want to shed some light on how situations that Spiro described could be avoided, namely how the tech industry is obsessing over developer experience and why that’s detrimental, why abstractions should be teaching you the technology as opposed to just doing the work for you, why you should be able to train your junior devs and much more!

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Listen on your favorite podcast player: https://www.backendbanter.fm

Spiro's X/Twitter: https://x.com/spirodonfl

Spiro's Website: https://spirofloropoulos.com/

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

00:35 Why are we having this conversation

01:33 How was HTMX involved in this?

03:38 Spiro's background

05:58 Why are we focusing so much on developer experience?

13:38 The Tech Industry as a whole is headed down the wrong path

16:17 Abstractions teaching you about the underlying technology rather than hiding it

18:47 What are the long-term consequences of unresolved technical debt?

26:46 There's things you can't blame frameworks for

28:27 We have to slow down

30:46 What happened after the introduction of HTMX into the project?

40:26 Hiring juniors is great, but you should have the resources to train them

47:00 The Technical Debt

50:32 The more complex the feature became, the bigger the struggle with HTMX

53:42 The reasons why Spiro was let go

57:10 Instead of Agile we should treat our programmers like adults

57:31 HTMX was instant and testing ability was better

01:01:21 Is Spiro looking for work?

01:02:00 Where to find Spiro