3 ms·

No, it’s not about minimizing work of others. When a company is downloading 400MB of a webpage, I don’t care who it is - it needs to be criticized. Who in the

No, it’s not about minimizing work of others. When a company is downloading 400MB of a webpage, I don’t care who it is - it needs to be criticized. Who in the right mind is in charge of this bloat at Google? I wonder what goes into the engineer’s minds when they try to build a page like this one. Goes into the same bucket as IBM Plex font page.

userbinator 7y ago
People working at Google are probably given a powerful computer with an outrageously fast Internet connection, which naturally leads to things like this not being noticeable for them. Combine that with a lack of intuitive notions of size[1] and the prevalent dogma of avoiding "premature optimisation" and it's not hard to see how this was created. [1] It's not just "non-computer people" who don't understand the units. I've taught students who have no trouble writing code or doing the maths in CS, but wouldn't be able to appreciate just how much 1MB of text is, or why trying to send me a 15MB screenshot as an email attachment is a bad idea.
- spectramax 7y ago
  I don’t buy that. Just looking at the network tab in Chrome can put things into perspective. I presume engineers at Google don’t run their own performance/speed utility: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=Design.google https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=... Design.google page scores an appalling, an abysmal score of 11/100. There is no defense to this behavior - these are professionals who are paid well and are supposed to be the brightest engineers on the planet, and yet they can’t design a page that meets their own standards for quality. 11/100 is shameful.
  - dave_sullivan 7y ago
    Spent the whole interview whiteboarding algorithms, forgot to ask about shrinking js bundle sizes. Google doesn’t concern itself with such menial concepts, just too busy saving the world by selling ads.
- jkoudys 7y ago
  Avoiding "premature optimization" has become such a ridiculous philosophy after it became mainstream and people forgot what it's actually supposed to mean. We stopped understanding the reasoning, and took those two words and ran with it instead. I frequently have people on IRC/discord ask a bot to tell me about "premature optimization" after I ask a specific question to resolve a bottleneck my profiling has uncovered. It's insane, and so sanctimonious.
- dickjocke 7y ago
  I'm a software developer of 3 years and I don't understand why sending a 15MB screenshot as an email attachment is a bad idea? I agree that intuitive notions of size are tricky. I try to lookup those comparisons about how large the works of Shakespeare or a Tale of Two Cities would be, but it never ever seems to stick. I'm able to remember that movies are roughly 1GB because it's easy and I encounter it a lot as a discrete unit. But yea, songs, text messages, single images, I really struggle with.
  - userbinator 7y ago
    In that case it was a 15MB uncompressed BMP of a desktop when the student only needed to attach the files and error messages he was experiencing. But yea, songs, text messages, single images, I really struggle with. Those would be MB, <1KB, and KB-MB, respectively. 1MB of text is a lot. In comparison, your comment is 506 bytes, or just slightly smaller than a disk sector (512B). That comment repeated 2000 times would be ~1MB.
    - dickjocke 7y ago
      very groovy thanks for those data points. edit: so I think ive settled on a good rule of thumb: movie: ~3GB song: ~3MB page of text: ~3KB
  - mopsi 7y ago
    10 MB is the largest email attachment that's universally accepted. 15 MB screenshot might not even get delivered. 15 MB is also absurdly wasteful. It would probably be <1 MB in a compressed format like JPG or PNG.

userbinator 7y ago

People working at Google are probably given a powerful computer with an outrageously fast Internet connection, which naturally leads to things like this not being noticeable for them. Combine that with a lack of intuitive notions of size[1] and the prevalent dogma of avoiding "premature optimisation" and it's not hard to see how this was created. [1] It's not just "non-computer people" who don't understand the units. I've taught students who have no trouble writing code or doing the maths in CS, but wouldn't be able to appreciate just how much 1MB of text is, or why trying to send me a 15MB screenshot as an email attachment is a bad idea.

spectramax 7y ago
I don’t buy that. Just looking at the network tab in Chrome can put things into perspective. I presume engineers at Google don’t run their own performance/speed utility: https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=Design.google https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=... Design.google page scores an appalling, an abysmal score of 11/100. There is no defense to this behavior - these are professionals who are paid well and are supposed to be the brightest engineers on the planet, and yet they can’t design a page that meets their own standards for quality. 11/100 is shameful.
- dave_sullivan 7y ago
  Spent the whole interview whiteboarding algorithms, forgot to ask about shrinking js bundle sizes. Google doesn’t concern itself with such menial concepts, just too busy saving the world by selling ads.
jkoudys 7y ago
Avoiding "premature optimization" has become such a ridiculous philosophy after it became mainstream and people forgot what it's actually supposed to mean. We stopped understanding the reasoning, and took those two words and ran with it instead. I frequently have people on IRC/discord ask a bot to tell me about "premature optimization" after I ask a specific question to resolve a bottleneck my profiling has uncovered. It's insane, and so sanctimonious.
dickjocke 7y ago
I'm a software developer of 3 years and I don't understand why sending a 15MB screenshot as an email attachment is a bad idea? I agree that intuitive notions of size are tricky. I try to lookup those comparisons about how large the works of Shakespeare or a Tale of Two Cities would be, but it never ever seems to stick. I'm able to remember that movies are roughly 1GB because it's easy and I encounter it a lot as a discrete unit. But yea, songs, text messages, single images, I really struggle with.
- userbinator 7y ago
  In that case it was a 15MB uncompressed BMP of a desktop when the student only needed to attach the files and error messages he was experiencing. But yea, songs, text messages, single images, I really struggle with. Those would be MB, <1KB, and KB-MB, respectively. 1MB of text is a lot. In comparison, your comment is 506 bytes, or just slightly smaller than a disk sector (512B). That comment repeated 2000 times would be ~1MB.
  - dickjocke 7y ago
    very groovy thanks for those data points. edit: so I think ive settled on a good rule of thumb: movie: ~3GB song: ~3MB page of text: ~3KB
- mopsi 7y ago
  10 MB is the largest email attachment that's universally accepted. 15 MB screenshot might not even get delivered. 15 MB is also absurdly wasteful. It would probably be <1 MB in a compressed format like JPG or PNG.