Comment by bigstrat2003
5 hours ago
You work on both. Sometimes you need to prioritize one, sometimes the other. And the benefit of the second option is "it makes our product higher quality, both because that is our work ethic but also because our customers will appreciate a quality product".
The business is only going to care about the bottom line. If it's not slow enough to cause business problems, they are not going to say "here's a week to make software faster"
Likewise engineers are only going to care about doing their job. If the business doesn't reward them from taking on optimization work, why would they do it?
This is not true of all engineers and all businesses. Some businesses really do 'get it' and will allow engineers to work on things that don't directly help stated goals. Some engineers are intrinsically motivated and will choose to work on things despite that work not helping their career.
What I'm really getting is, yes, engineers choose "slower" technologies (e.g. electron, React) because there are other benefits, e.g. being able to get work done faster. This is a completely rational choice even if it does lead to "waste" and poor performance.