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Long ago I watched a documentary about the early Apple days, when management was encouraging their developers to reduce boot times by 10 seconds. The argument w

Long ago I watched a documentary about the early Apple days, when management was encouraging their developers to reduce boot times by 10 seconds. The argument was that 10 seconds multiplied by the number of boot sequences would result in saving many human lives worth of time. Edit: found a link with the same story: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt The software world needs more of this kind of thinking. Not more arguments like "programmer's time is worth less than CPU time", which often fail to account for all externalities.

jchoca 7y ago
I wish more companies thought like this in general. I often think about the nature of the work I'm doing as a developer and wonder if it's making society better off as a whole. The answer is usually a resounding no.
- qlk1123 7y ago
  Same here, but why exactly? In my country, SW engineer is one of the best careers in terms of income, and I bet it is similar in most of the other countries. Why do we deserve that much buzz/fame/respect/income if the work we are doing is NOT making the society better? These thoughts just haunt me from time to time.
  - narag 7y ago
    That's obvious. It's a work that by definition reach many others automatically and acts faster than humans, with less human intervention so it saves work. Anything that saves time/money and has this multiplication effect will generate tons of cash. No wonder we catch a part of it. Edit: in other simpler words, it's useful and scales fine.
  - bscphil 7y ago
    > Why do we deserve that much buzz/fame/respect/income if the work we are doing is NOT making the society better? I understand that you're asking a theoretical question, not a practical one, but in practical terms the answer is fairly simple. Our economy is not built to (indeed, is built not to) reward individuals in line with what they contribute to society. An entirely different set of incentives are what structure our economy, and therefore the jobs and lives of most people. In some sense, David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs is all about the widespread awareness (and denial) of this phenomenon, and what caused it. I wouldn't say it's a perfect book but it's the best one I've read on the subject.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  I think my work makes society some infinitisemal amount better.
- barrkel 7y ago
  They could think like this if it became part of their cost structure. There's no reason for them to think like this other than in terms of profit & loss.
Avamander 7y ago
I like the "human lifetimes wasted"-metric. It's interesting to think that a badly optimized piece of code used by a few million people basically kills a few each day. If every manager, client and programmer thought for a second if the 30min they save is worth the human lifespans wasted I think we'd have better software.
debt 7y ago
"...would result in saving many human lives worth of time." Meh this is manager-speak for "saving human lives" which they definitely were not. They weren't saving anybody. I mean, there's argument that, in modern day, 2020, time away from the computer is more well-spent than on a computer; so a faster boot time is actually worse than a slower boot time. Faster boot time is less time with the family. Good managers, like Steve Jobs was, are really good at motivating people using false narratives.
andyroid 7y ago
This implies that time not spent using their software is time wasted doing nothing. Not that reducing boot times would be a bad thing, but that sounds more like a marketing gimmick. As kids we would wait for forever for our Commodore 64 games to load - knowing this we planned accordingly.
barrkel 7y ago
If the cost of that boot time was somehow materialized upstream - e.g. if companies that produced OSes had to pay for the compute resources they used, rather than the consumer paying for the compute - then economics would solve the problem. As it is, software can largely free ride on consumer resources.
jrcplus 7y ago
That's an important comment and made me think that nobody here has mentioned climate change (where human lives are/will be affected, literally). There is an emerging movement toward low-carbon, low-tech, sustainable web design, but it's still very much fringe. To make it mainstream, we all need to work on coming up with better economic incentives.

jchoca 7y ago

I wish more companies thought like this in general. I often think about the nature of the work I'm doing as a developer and wonder if it's making society better off as a whole. The answer is usually a resounding no.

qlk1123 7y ago
Same here, but why exactly? In my country, SW engineer is one of the best careers in terms of income, and I bet it is similar in most of the other countries. Why do we deserve that much buzz/fame/respect/income if the work we are doing is NOT making the society better? These thoughts just haunt me from time to time.
- narag 7y ago
  That's obvious. It's a work that by definition reach many others automatically and acts faster than humans, with less human intervention so it saves work. Anything that saves time/money and has this multiplication effect will generate tons of cash. No wonder we catch a part of it. Edit: in other simpler words, it's useful and scales fine.
- bscphil 7y ago
  > Why do we deserve that much buzz/fame/respect/income if the work we are doing is NOT making the society better? I understand that you're asking a theoretical question, not a practical one, but in practical terms the answer is fairly simple. Our economy is not built to (indeed, is built not to) reward individuals in line with what they contribute to society. An entirely different set of incentives are what structure our economy, and therefore the jobs and lives of most people. In some sense, David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs is all about the widespread awareness (and denial) of this phenomenon, and what caused it. I wouldn't say it's a perfect book but it's the best one I've read on the subject.
Aeolun 7y ago
I think my work makes society some infinitisemal amount better.
barrkel 7y ago
They could think like this if it became part of their cost structure. There's no reason for them to think like this other than in terms of profit & loss.

Avamander 7y ago

I like the "human lifetimes wasted"-metric. It's interesting to think that a badly optimized piece of code used by a few million people basically kills a few each day. If every manager, client and programmer thought for a second if the 30min they save is worth the human lifespans wasted I think we'd have better software.

debt 7y ago

"...would result in saving many human lives worth of time." Meh this is manager-speak for "saving human lives" which they definitely were not. They weren't saving anybody. I mean, there's argument that, in modern day, 2020, time away from the computer is more well-spent than on a computer; so a faster boot time is actually worse than a slower boot time. Faster boot time is less time with the family. Good managers, like Steve Jobs was, are really good at motivating people using false narratives.

andyroid 7y ago

This implies that time not spent using their software is time wasted doing nothing. Not that reducing boot times would be a bad thing, but that sounds more like a marketing gimmick. As kids we would wait for forever for our Commodore 64 games to load - knowing this we planned accordingly.

barrkel 7y ago

If the cost of that boot time was somehow materialized upstream - e.g. if companies that produced OSes had to pay for the compute resources they used, rather than the consumer paying for the compute - then economics would solve the problem. As it is, software can largely free ride on consumer resources.

jrcplus 7y ago

That's an important comment and made me think that nobody here has mentioned climate change (where human lives are/will be affected, literally). There is an emerging movement toward low-carbon, low-tech, sustainable web design, but it's still very much fringe. To make it mainstream, we all need to work on coming up with better economic incentives.