But that's not how the argument is used in practice. In practice this argument is used to justify bloated apps, bad engineering, and corner-cutting. When people say “users don’t care about your tech stack,” what they really mean is that product quality doesn’t matter.
Yesterday File Pilot (no affiliation) hit the HN frontpage. File Pilot is written from scratch and it has a ton of functionality packed in a 1.8mb download. As somebody on Twitter pointed out, a debug build of "hello world!" in Rust clocks in at 3.7mb. (No shade on Rust)
Users don't care what language or libraries you use. Users care only about functionality, right? But guess what? These two things are not independent. If you want to make something that starts instantly you can't use electron or java. You can't use bloated libraries. Because users do notice. All else equal users will absolutely choose the zippiest products.
No, it means that product quality is all that matters. The users don't care how you make it work, only that it works how they want it to.
I have written performant high quality products in weird tech stacks where performance can be s bit tricky to get: Ruby, PL/PgSQL, Perl, etc. But it was done by a team who cared a lot about technology and their tech stack. Otherwise it would not have been possible to do.
There are developers who care about product and not about tech. They build things that just barely work.
There are developers who care about both. They build the stuff people remember.
> What truly makes a difference for users is your attention to the product and their needs.
> Learn to distinguish between tech choices that are interesting to you and those that are genuinely valuable for your product and your users.
Then you need to read more, because that's what it means. The tech stack doesn't matter. Only the quality of the product. That quality is defined by the user. Not you. Not your opinion. Not your belief. But the user of the product.
> which hurt the user.
This will self correct.
Horrible tech choices have lead to world class products that people love and cherish. The perfect tech choices have lead to things people laugh at and serve as a reminder that the tech stack doesn't matter, and in fact, may be a red flag.
"It's a basic tool that sits hidden in my tray 99.9% of the time and it should not use 500MB of memory when it's not doing anything" is part of product quality.
You can have a super great product that makes a ton of money right now that has such poor build quality that you become too calcified to improve in a reasonable amount of time
This is why startups can outcompete incumbents sometimes
Suddenly there's a market shift and a startup can actually build your entire product and the new competitive edge in less time than it takes you to add just the new competitive edge, because your code and architecture has atrophied to the point it takes longer to update it than it would to rebuild from scratch
Maybe this isn't as common as I think, I don't know. But I am pretty sure it does happen
But it says that in such a roundabout way that non technical people use it as an argument for MBAs to dictate technical decisions in the name of moving fast and breaking things.
I don't know what technology was used to build the audio mixer that I got from Temu. I do know that it's a massive pile of garbage because I can hear it when I plug it in. The tech stack IS the product quality.
Agree the article is not clearly presented but it's crazy to see the gigantic threads here that seem to be based on a misunderstanding.