Comment by dns_snek
2 days ago
We're not talking about writing assembly by hand here. If your software has a million daily users and wastes a minute of their day, that's about 9 work-years of labour wasted every single day.
In a 5-year lifecycle that's about 10,000 years of human labour wasted. Yes, I had to quadruple-check this myself.
Does it take 10,000 work-years of effort, per project, to train its developers to write reasonably performant code?
Of course not all of this would translate into actual productivity gains but it doesn't have to.
What world are you living in where the median piece of software has a million users? Or even a hundredth of that?
I work on software with millions of users..? Sure, it’s not the median, but it exists and there’s a lot of it.
Unfortunately the number of users and the collective value of their wasted time doesn’t make arguing for efficiency and performance any easier.
I'm not talking about the median piece of software with 2 users and 0.1 developers (I made that up).
The ones that stick out are actively maintained, widely used, and well funded. It doesn't have to be a million active users, but they should be the first to get their act together.
It's what many software companies dream of and aim for. But the same argument works with 10k users, or even 1k users.
You are failing to consider the opportunity cost of how much more work-years can be saved by making a new feature.