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> But the most annoying problem with any internet voice chat is not so much the quality but the latency. Landline phones have noticeably lower voice quality but

> But the most annoying problem with any internet voice chat is not so much the quality but the latency. Landline phones have noticeably lower voice quality but one can still enjoy a conversation perfectly well. High latency, on the other hand, absolutely ruins the experience. Maybe this is because traditional communications were built by people working exclusively in that field - and they eventually became true experts, with a deep understanding of the real issues. Nowadays Internet chat services are cobbled together by happy-go-lucky engineers who, prior to this, maybe did an ads firehose on Twitter, and after this project will perhaps move on to work on Facebook games or whatever. Smart people to be sure, but their understanding of the field is necessarily superficial. The fast rate of change in this industry explains many of the things that are ailing it currently.

dmix 10y ago
> Nowadays Internet chat services are cobbled together by happy-go-lucky engineers who, prior to this, maybe did an ads firehose on Twitter, Skype has been around for 13 years. It isn't a young startup full of ex-node.js programmers. WhatsApp also has some excellent infrastructure built on top of Erlang which has decades of experience and refinement of heavy-duty telecom usage baked into the framework. If anything the experience of previous development trickles down and younger engineers benefit from that knowledge. But I'm not sure I buy the idea that you can only build great systems if you've only been doing that one category for your whole career. The rate of jobs changes faster and in front-end development the pace of toolset changes pretty fast. But even in front-end development it's still the same languages. usually just the tools are the trendy part. And if it's switching languages every 5-7 yrs that knowledge of languages is transferable. I've only benefited as a programmer from exposure to many other languages (and projects). Regardless, the hardcore backend guys you get to build this type of infrastructure isn't the same hipster front-end devs that Twitter hired in the early years to build out a consumer product. Consumer is very different than building out telecom infrastructure in Erlang/C++.

dmix 10y ago

> Nowadays Internet chat services are cobbled together by happy-go-lucky engineers who, prior to this, maybe did an ads firehose on Twitter, Skype has been around for 13 years. It isn't a young startup full of ex-node.js programmers. WhatsApp also has some excellent infrastructure built on top of Erlang which has decades of experience and refinement of heavy-duty telecom usage baked into the framework. If anything the experience of previous development trickles down and younger engineers benefit from that knowledge. But I'm not sure I buy the idea that you can only build great systems if you've only been doing that one category for your whole career. The rate of jobs changes faster and in front-end development the pace of toolset changes pretty fast. But even in front-end development it's still the same languages. usually just the tools are the trendy part. And if it's switching languages every 5-7 yrs that knowledge of languages is transferable. I've only benefited as a programmer from exposure to many other languages (and projects). Regardless, the hardcore backend guys you get to build this type of infrastructure isn't the same hipster front-end devs that Twitter hired in the early years to build out a consumer product. Consumer is very different than building out telecom infrastructure in Erlang/C++.