This post is interesting because at the bottom, Discord is soliciting for engineers. Gabriel Peal from AirBnB came and gave a talk at our company a few weeks ago and he shared at after AirBnB published their 5 part medium series[1], they got a huge flood of mobile developer resumes.
Yeah. I guess my point is that they are trying to get web/mobile engineers, but the data from AirBnB shows that the opposite of this post is what actually attracts mobile engineers.
What AirBnB showed is that there are a load of mobile engineers out there who don't want to work with React Native.
What Discord might show is that there are also a load of mobile engineers out there who do.
Personally I find it baffling why anybody would choose to work with anything based on JavaScript (I'm grumpy enough about having to work with something as primitive and loosely-typed as C#, so I find JavaScript an endless horror show), but there are people sitting right near me in my office who work on frontend web code all day and chose to do that and actually enjoy it.
So really, I guess I'm saying we're all different. And that's a good thing, because there are lots of different jobs we need to get done to keep all these systems running.
They probably got a flood of applications from native mobile engineers who want to work for a successful company who's new architecture direction aligns with their existing (native framework) skills.
If the announcement was the other way around (we're going from native to react native!) I bet they would have gotten a similar flood of web/rn engineers.
I don't really see a problem with them doing that. I'm not even sure I'd consider it manipulative. They walk through some design decisions, talk about their codebase, at the end say "if this sounds interesting to you, think about working for us."
Just because it benefits them doesn't mean it's exploitative or bad.
[1] - https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/sunsetting-react-nativ...