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Next question: how often would this kind of malprogramming actually lead to deal-breaking performance issues in a project? After a decade in the industry, count

Next question: how often would this kind of malprogramming actually lead to deal-breaking performance issues in a project? After a decade in the industry, countless projects delivered and much shit code witnessed, I can empirically answer this question, and the the answer is -- even at places that are known for their technical excellence -- not often. Look, I'm not advocating illiterate programming, nor am I a proponent of unprofessional work. I took my share of CS classes, and I can talk about algorithms and how to analyze them. The number of times I have had to do so on the job, however, can be counted on my bodily digits, without taking off my shoes. This is probably not an original observation, but a big part of why these unproductive conversations keep on happening here has to do with how young HN demographic skews. When the biggest achievement in your life is getting that new degree you spent $BIGNUMBER $$/years on, you're going to want to belittle workmanlike programmers who don't measure up to your own standards. It takes a while for people to move on and grow up.

pjc50 10y ago
> how often would this kind of malprogramming actually lead to deal-breaking performance issues in a project? Depends very much on your projects. Web developers generally have it easy, as it's cheap to add more servers and free to burn CPU in the browser. Even so you can get into trouble with anything that's O(N) in the number of users. I do wonder how much use of nosql is from people who think SQL is slow because they've not got their indexes set up properly. Game developers, of course, live and breathe performance. As do embedded and similar low-level environments. Or people working with this trendy "big" data.
sbov 10y ago
Performance will rarely be deal breaking. Instead people will toil away with slow systems and just accept it. It doesn't mean that they wouldn't be much happier with a faster system. We recently replaced a system whose online store took about 900ms to respond, and their back end admin section on average around 1.7 seconds. It obviously wasn't deal breaking since they lived with it for 3 years but it still was still ridiculous, and definitely had an impact on both their productivity and bottom line.
emodendroket 10y ago
How big is the list we're talking about?

pjc50 10y ago

> how often would this kind of malprogramming actually lead to deal-breaking performance issues in a project? Depends very much on your projects. Web developers generally have it easy, as it's cheap to add more servers and free to burn CPU in the browser. Even so you can get into trouble with anything that's O(N) in the number of users. I do wonder how much use of nosql is from people who think SQL is slow because they've not got their indexes set up properly. Game developers, of course, live and breathe performance. As do embedded and similar low-level environments. Or people working with this trendy "big" data.

sbov 10y ago

Performance will rarely be deal breaking. Instead people will toil away with slow systems and just accept it. It doesn't mean that they wouldn't be much happier with a faster system. We recently replaced a system whose online store took about 900ms to respond, and their back end admin section on average around 1.7 seconds. It obviously wasn't deal breaking since they lived with it for 3 years but it still was still ridiculous, and definitely had an impact on both their productivity and bottom line.

emodendroket 10y ago

How big is the list we're talking about?