Comment by austin-cheney
15 hours ago
The shitty team excuse.
Performance is not complicated. You measure something and compare the numbers. Through my career I have encountered the following failures repeatedly:
* The complete inability to measure things. This is common among people with low social intelligence. Many people in this line of work cannot measure things and form all kinds of bullshit excuses. Cannot do it all as if they are disabled. Sometimes it is laziness, sometimes it’s autism masking, and sometimes it’s stupidity/ignorance where they believe they shouldn’t have to or are superior from convention alone.
* The shitty team argument. It’s common for people to intentionally avoid or discard measures because there is fear superior performance may indicate an operating deficit. The last thing anybody in software wants is to change approach if they are on a shitty team, because corporate developers are allergic to training people. This is often justified by asking what happens if you work on a team or about new hires.
* Throwing performance data away and lying about it. This is very common when performance data provides evidence that current conventions or favorite tools harm performance. If, for example querySelectors measure 100,000 times slower than some other approaches developers will pretend the performance evidence just doesn’t exist.
* Guessing. When people suck at what they do they invent their own performance realities. When people guess at software performance they are supremely wrong more than 80% of the time and tend to be wrong by multiple orders of magnitude.
You’re confidently making a lot of assumptions that don’t generalize.
For example:
> performance is not complicated
Not to mention all your assumptions about the motivations of people who don’t do optimization well. That one can’t possibly generalize.
They are not generalizations. They are frequently repeated observations. The ability to operate from evidence is what determines if you are working with real professionals or children pretenders.
Most people are somewhere in the middle, again the dichotomy doesn’t generalize.
I would like to half agree to this.
Saying "Performance is not complicated" is not wrong. People and the systems set up for an application make it complicated. Its harder to check and verify.
I work in UI performance and the biggest thing slowing me down is always people
You measure and improve the metric, but at what cost, when should you stop? Have you worked on a 1mill+ loc web app?
You improve performance for a variety of reasons. You stop when you have competing evidence. The other 99% of the time it’s just developers making bullshit excuses.
And it's specially easy for the case of CSS: less CSS, more faster.
> This is common among people with low social intelligence
lol What? It's always amusing to me when someone makes absolute claims like "the industry" when having seen < 0.1% of it.