Comment by blub
5 years ago
Judging by the dismissals of performance concerns seen in typical online discussion threads, I'm not sure that developers working on performance tuning in any meaningful way still post online.
On the contrary, I have the impression that people snubbing performance while claiming that user satisfaction or business goals are the only things that matter do not care about performance or dare I say technical brilliance at all.
I'm starting to come to the conclusion that performance is much more important than we realise.
This thread is about how Spotify seemed like magic in the early days. The original iPhone seemed like magic. Netflix seems like magic in how fast it can stream. Similarly, early google and amazon were always fast.
I believe our subconscious values speed as an indication of quality far more than our product owners know how to measure for.
I can only share my experience. I used Spotify for the first time in 2011. It completely defied what I thought was possible with music streaming.
Songs would play immediately. It was faster than iTunes. I believe Spotify is still faster than Apple Music.
This was at a time when I had no expectation that my smartphone's internet was fast enough to do much of anything. It was so impressive, that I became a paying customer and have been a paying Spotify customer for 10 years.
And Spotify pulls a lot of annoying bullshit. They have a habit of treating their users like shit in various ways - you pay and don't get ads in between songs, but they still spam pop ups and try to direct your behavior in various ways. It feels like their attitude towards you as a user is very much influenced by the "free tier" even if you're a paying customer.
Their various app UIs have suffered greatly over the years (current incarnation is mostly tolerable)
But the base thing they do - play music faster than any other service is what has kept me. I also don't think it is ethical that Apple can offer a competing service, while forcing Spotify to give up a significant cut of its revenue. I think it should be illegal, so I likely would never pay for Apple Music because of that.
In terms of running a business, surely user satisfaction and business goals are much more directly relevant than performance in and of itself, except insofar it contributes to the former? So it's not surprising to me that you'd see a lot of that sentiment on a forum hosted by a startup accelerator, nor that it's what for-profit organizations optimize for. That doesn't mean that people can't also have an appreciation for well-performing or technically brilliant code.
> I'm not sure that developers working on performance tuning in any meaningful way still post online
This is a very confusing comment to me since "cares a lot about performance" is probably one of the most consistent attributes of the HN readership—or they are at least a highly vocal subset of the community.
Personally, I respect technical brilliance, but believe it comes in many varieties, of which performance tuning is just one and not on any kind of higher plane.