By: A Software Engineer, with assistance from ChatGPT
This article reflects the raw frustrations and hard truths observed by a developer committed to sustainable software engineering. It has been co-written and refined with the help of AI language model ChatGPT to ensure clarity and impact.
Stop the Hack: Why Quick-and-Dirty Development Is Hurting Us All
I am very, very disturbed about the fact that so many people favor quick hackers to build products that do not scale. If only someone with a lot of influence could tell the world:
Hey, stop the fucking hack! It does not work and causes the world to crash, all for the benefit of your wallet.
For years, I’ve watched teams chase rapid delivery at the expense of sound architecture and sustainable practices. The tech industry has glorified “move fast and break things,” but the truth is, this reckless mentality creates technical debt that cripples teams and ruins products.
Many companies jump on trendy stacks like Node.js not because it’s the best tool for the job, but because it’s perceived as fast to prototype and cheap to hire for. The massive npm ecosystem is attractive, but it’s a double-edged sword: packages of varying quality pile up, creating brittle systems that are difficult to maintain or scale.
Often, the choice of Node.js stems from a lack of strong experience in object-oriented design, type safety, and architectural discipline. The focus shifts from engineering durable solutions to hacking something together quickly — and then patching it endlessly.
Meanwhile, the .NET ecosystem has transformed drastically. With .NET 8, Microsoft has delivered a mature, high-performance, open-source, and cloud-native framework that is battle-tested in enterprises worldwide. It supports strong typing, asynchronous programming, dependency injection, and powerful tooling — all crucial for building scalable and maintainable systems.
Performance benchmarks consistently rank .NET among the fastest server-side platforms. The framework is cross-platform, supports microservices, minimal APIs, Blazor for UI, gRPC, and AOT compilation — the future-proof tools teams need.
Yet despite all this, many organizations overlook .NET because of past impressions or short-term cost pressures. I’ve witnessed firsthand how switching from .NET to Node.js led to long-term chaos in teams, lost productivity, and unstable systems — not because Node.js is inherently bad, but because it was chosen without proper understanding or strategic planning.
The obsession with speed over quality is shortsighted and dangerous. It devalues craftsmanship and leads to bloated technical debt that will inevitably slow you down, cause outages, and burn out your engineers.
If we want software that lasts, that scales gracefully, and that we can be proud of, we must stop the hack. We must demand better. Sustainable software engineering is not optional — it is a necessity for any business serious about success.
References & Further Reading:
TechEmpower Framework Benchmarks: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/
.NET 8 Official Documentation: [https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/dotnet-eight]
“The Cost of Technical Debt” by Steve McConnell
“Clean Code” by Robert C. Martin
“Node.js at Scale: Pitfalls and Lessons” (various engineering blogs)
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