Facebook can make software great because they have great engineers, but they've suffered a major case of scope creep, which leads to more than a few loose ends as the company assigns their best engineers to [choose your own adventure]:
- maximum profits (woohoo!)
- reaction to potential regulation
- unwanted press attention
- wanted press attention
- the shiny new thing
That's why I never switched to React. It's a good way to organize things and was clearly well engineered from the start, but there are other choices besides React (and RN) where leaders have demonstrated their willingness to stick with it through thick and thin because...it's all they do.
This is a pretty unrealistic view of how big companies work. Engineers aren't fungible, and no one has been "pulled off" of React or React Native to anything like you suggest.
React is my full time job (I was also the #1 committer before joining FB) and no one is planning to abandon it. Even if Facebook company leadership decided for some reason to divest, React would live on with the support of its community similar to other projects without corporate backing.
While it may be your full-time job, you're still participating in a larger mission, right?
Take the case of the legal problems with the React license that eventually were ironed out or the privacy issues facing the company more recently.
Neither of those would have been a factor in your day to day life if React was its own thing, right?
If no engineer has left the team, through their own will or through enticement, you have my apologies.
I'm not arguing that you're not committed. I'm arguing that working for a large company is a distraction, which is true of all large companies. Would you agree that the licensing issue was unnecessary and distracting?
Don't get me wrong, I think you're doing great work and React isn't going anywhere, but there's a broader mission there that is distracting from doing that one thing. Do you ever wish it were it's own thing (if money weren't involved)?
Certainly there are downsides to any setup, but due to React Native's large ambitions I'm unsure if it could have ever been created by an independent community. There is a lot of work that goes into it and the abundant availability of complex real-world problems (to a greater extent than I've seen anywhere else) spurred by this setup pushes React Native to be a more capable project.
Thanks for the insight. I can tell from how you write about React, you're very dedicated, and I feel your passion.
Upper-level managers at the large companies I've worked for universally saw these types of projects as "cost centers" and tended to interfere in ways that demonstrated a basic misunderstanding of the value. I hope that's not true in your case.
Scope creep? Is that a nice way of adding shitty useless features and dark patterns? Because Facebook wins the gold medal there. Marketplace and their garbage message app for instance.
- maximum profits (woohoo!) - reaction to potential regulation - unwanted press attention - wanted press attention - the shiny new thing
That's why I never switched to React. It's a good way to organize things and was clearly well engineered from the start, but there are other choices besides React (and RN) where leaders have demonstrated their willingness to stick with it through thick and thin because...it's all they do.