4 ms·

OK, you go to your boss and tell him that because of the marketing team's scripts the app takes twice as long to load. Your boss on other hand says: "Who cares?

• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• brlewis 7y ago
  > OK, you go to your boss and tell him that because of the marketing team's scripts the app takes twice as long to load. Your boss on other hand says: "Who cares? This is how we make money". What company do you work for that makes more money by causing your app to load twice as slow? I think it's reasonable to expect a developer to measure and present the correlation between performance and revenue.
  • guggle 7y ago
    > What company do you work for that makes more money by causing your app to load twice as slow? I used to work in e-commerce and in spite of my repeated warnings about performance, no boss cared. Then some SEO consultant said "google wants fast websites". Guess who got blamed ?
  • mbesto 7y ago
    > I think it's reasonable to expect a developer to measure and present the correlation between performance and revenue. I'll bite. Do you really do this? If so, I'm seriously curious about how you could conclude a straight line causation (not just correlation) between an increase in revenue by an increase in performance? Potentially for a large scale site like Twitter, Facebook where performance means less eyeballs, but even then it's just a correlation.
    • KaiserPro 7y ago
      Graphs. I was here https://medium.com/ft-product-technology/a-faster-ft-com-10e7c077dc1c https://medium.com/ft-product-technology/a-faster-ft-com-10e... when they did this. Its easy to find graphs that support your conclusion.
    • brlewis 7y ago
      Where I work we already have people doing this, so I don't have to. If your project doesn't tie directly to revenue it surely has KPIs which would be affected by performance.
    • layoutIfNeeded 7y ago
      You don’t need sound reasoning that could withstand scientific scrutiny. Management won’t be able to distinguish valid from bogus data. Just p-hack until it fits your conclusion - they’ll eat it up in no time.
  • nextlevelwizard 7y ago
    >What company do you work for that makes more money by causing your app to load twice as slow? I'm not sure if you are trolling. Can you seriously not parse out that sentence? It is the ad revenue that makes the money. The app loading slow is a side effect. No one (that I know of) is making money by deliberately making slow applications, just think for a second that makes no sense. However a lot of applications make money from ads.
• KaiserPro 7y ago
  > Boss asks how much money are we losing because of this. You have no answer. What do you do? This is my point. If you can't answer the first and most basic question with hard data, you're fucked. There is literally no point going to one's boss and saying "this is morally wrong" unless you can make a business case. (or your boss has the same world view as you.) If you can't argue that your change is going to move a KPI for the better, you've lost your argument. I know lots of "tech" people like to waft about thinking that they are above such mundane things as buisness KPIs (OKRs if your management team has swallowed google's rubbish) Thats why they think they are such maligned geniuses. Tech is an enabler for a business to do business. Its just another tool, like a warehouse, van or envelope. If you want to make sure you're not going to get slung out during the next re-org, you have to make sure that you are performing to what the _buisness_ wants from you. Thats a two way street. for example, marketing come up to us and say: "we need a microsite for the conference thats coming up" Sure I could make a K8s cluster to host a website. But I could do it quicker and cheaper by using a PaaS(or Saas), trumpet the speed and clarity of my execution, underline in triplicate the capex cost I've saved (ignoring the opex, because they won't find out about that till next year, plus it's not my bill, I'm measured on staff costs.) Is it cutting edge? is it fuck. Does it get me browny points? you bet ya. I can then spend those browny points on trying to change things about my working environment that I don't like. As I've made marketing happy, I can work on them to find a better tracking company, or better yet, get them to pay us to develop their BI pipeline. Sure its not a "pure tech" experience. But I can affect way more change than reskinning the website in yet another framework, following the latest animation style guide from some sadistic nonce claiming to be a UX guru. So No. I wouldn't quit over this. Because I'm not a Wilde-esq dandy.
  • fulafel 7y ago
    > There is literally no point going to one's boss and saying "this is morally wrong" unless you can make a business case. (or your boss has the same world view as you.) If your boss is worth their salt, reasonable moral objections will be taken seriously. It's management 101. If not, you are probably not going to be happy there anyway.