Comment by austin-cheney
1 day ago
It would be funny if it weren’t tragic. So many of the comments here echo the nonsense of my software career: developers twisting themselves in knots to justify writing slow software.
1 day ago
It would be funny if it weren’t tragic. So many of the comments here echo the nonsense of my software career: developers twisting themselves in knots to justify writing slow software.
I've not seen a compelling reason start the performance fight in ordinary companies doing CRUD apps. Even if I was good at performance, I wouldn't give that away for free, and I'd prefer to go to companies where it's a requirement (HFT or games), which only furthers the issue about slowness being ubiquitous.
For example, I dropped a 5s paginated query doing a weird cross join to ~30ms and all I got for that is a pat on the back. It wasn't skill, but just recognizing we didn't need the cross join part.
We'd need to start firing people who write slow queries, forcing them to become good, or pay more for developers who know how to measure and deliver performance, which I also don't think is happening.
For 99% of apps slow software is compensated by fast hardware. In almost all cases, the speed of your software does not matter anymore. Unless speed is critical, you can absolutely justify writing slow software if its more maintainable that way.
And thus when I clicked on the link to a NPR story just now it was 10 seconds before the page was reasable on my computer.
Now my computer (pinebook pro) was never known as fast, but still it runs circles around the first computer I ran a browser. (I'm not sure which computer that was, but likely the CPU was running at 25mhz, could have been a 80486 or a Sparc CPU though - now get off my lawn you kids)
Those are things developers say to keep themselves employable.
We are long past knitting RAM. You should go with the times. Development speed is key nowadays. People literally dont care about speed. If they did, Amazon & Facebook were long gone.
1 reply →
Your users feel otherwise. If you actually care at all about the quality of the software you produce, stop rationalizing slow software.
No. Only tech savy users care. And these are the minority of relevant users. Why do people still buy shit on Amazon despite Amazon being horribly slow?