5 ms·

I’d figured it was mostly cheap companies driving the broadly terrible performance of modern software for often fairly small benefits to speed and dev cost, but

I’d figured it was mostly cheap companies driving the broadly terrible performance of modern software for often fairly small benefits to speed and dev cost, but it turns out there’s a much stronger contingent of software developers with not just a tolerance for business-driven trade-offs, but a strongly enabling attitude toward the whole thing, apparently not seeing what they’re doing the same way I do at all. Adding this information, observed software quality makes a lot more sense to me now.

aprdm 6y ago
Software developers are hired by business to solve business problems. Optimization of speed is sometimes it, sometimes it isn't. I have worked accelerating algorithms in VHDL with a PCI-e interface, embedded linux without a MMU because a MMU uses too many logical gates, digital signal processing systems (FFT, goertzel, sigma delta filters) that had to process a lot of data under uS and etc. Now a days I work more in the devops space, full stack dev and whatnot. I have worked with a lot of technologies, different constraints, different teams, different companies (12 in total) in different industries. Trying to paint all business and developers as bad or as cheap because business requirements do not align with your view isn't really fair.
- pantaloony 6y ago
  > Trying to paint all business and developers as bad or as cheap because business requirements do not align with your view isn't really fair. Yes, that would be unfair.
- bananaface 6y ago
  Twitter failing to load on a stable connection and crashing the browser if you scroll too far is not the result of business tradeoffs. It's a failure to achieve their own goals.
  - aprdm 6y ago
    Are you sure there's not something wrong with your environment? Twitter has lots of users (me included) and is not a problem I have seen in any platform I access twitter from.
    - pantaloony 6y ago
      I also hit errors following links to twitter more often than not, reliably, on all sorts of environments. It feels like they’re doing some kind of cache-related routing based on headers. Often “refresh” doesn’t fix it, but hitting enter in the address bar does. Seen on iOS, macOS, Windows, and Linux, mostly in very normal browsers (I’d expect mobile Safari in particular is at least on their top-5 most-seen browsers). I’d assumed they were trying to annoy me enough that I install their app. I’ve seen many others report the same kind of reliable, very frequent errors. Notably, I’m also not logged in, which might be another thing they’re trying to get me to do and another difference between those who hit this more often than not, and those who rarely or never see it. It’s been like this for years.
      - aprdm 6y ago
        That sucks! I heard reddit also does things differently when you're logged in/ logged off. I haven't had a bad experience with these platforms myself but it sucks that it is so bad for other people.
        bananaface 6y ago
        The page loading thing used to happen to me regardless of login status, but it's less frequent now. The crashing was mostly just on mobile - that's still a problem. If I remember right the app would also crash but it could take bigger loads. Not sure, I uninstalled it.
_____s 6y ago
I'm not sure it's the cheap companies or developers driving this. Even companies that pay really well produce pretty slow software (Gmail, etc.). It's mostly the ecosystem in which software is developed. As someone else said, businesses hire software engineers to solve business problems. Speed often isn't a priority. Fast software will make the experience perceivably better, but it's hard to get on a sales call and tell a potential customer that your application loads much faster when they are looking for feature X. And most companies buying software are looking at a checklist of features first and then maybe the experience. You also need to put in the time to make software fast and then keep it fast. It's not something you can tack on at the end—if you want something to be fast, that has to be carefully considered from the very beginning. By the time people notice something is too slow, you're burdened by half baked architecture and a monstrosity of a codebase. At that point, it's near impossible to really make anything fast.
- gregjor 6y ago
  > most companies buying software are looking at a checklist of features first and then maybe the experience. I think the hugely successful SalesForce proves this point. Just one standout among many such products.
  - bananaface 6y ago
    I would argue they won because of marketing, not because they had unique functionality. Features are not that hard to build, most basic tooling can be cloned with a relatively small budget.
    - _____s 6y ago
      Most enterprise businesses win because of better sales and distribution, but your product ultimately has to support your sales. Salesforce had both (and other advantages). How does sales work in medium to large B2B? You'll get a RFP with a list of questions, you'll often get a list of features that company X wants. Naturally, as a company, you'd focus on building those features instead of optimising speed. If the market values fast software, you'll see a lot more fast software. There _is_ a lot of unnecessarily slow software these days, so it _is_ starting to happen. Think Superhuman, Linear.app, etc. — an entire category of software based primarily on the idea of being fast, aimed at the power user. If these apps succeed, you'll see a lot more of them. If the market doesn't value fast software, most commercial software will be slow.

aprdm 6y ago

Software developers are hired by business to solve business problems. Optimization of speed is sometimes it, sometimes it isn't. I have worked accelerating algorithms in VHDL with a PCI-e interface, embedded linux without a MMU because a MMU uses too many logical gates, digital signal processing systems (FFT, goertzel, sigma delta filters) that had to process a lot of data under uS and etc. Now a days I work more in the devops space, full stack dev and whatnot. I have worked with a lot of technologies, different constraints, different teams, different companies (12 in total) in different industries. Trying to paint all business and developers as bad or as cheap because business requirements do not align with your view isn't really fair.

pantaloony 6y ago
> Trying to paint all business and developers as bad or as cheap because business requirements do not align with your view isn't really fair. Yes, that would be unfair.
bananaface 6y ago
Twitter failing to load on a stable connection and crashing the browser if you scroll too far is not the result of business tradeoffs. It's a failure to achieve their own goals.
- aprdm 6y ago
  Are you sure there's not something wrong with your environment? Twitter has lots of users (me included) and is not a problem I have seen in any platform I access twitter from.
  - pantaloony 6y ago
    I also hit errors following links to twitter more often than not, reliably, on all sorts of environments. It feels like they’re doing some kind of cache-related routing based on headers. Often “refresh” doesn’t fix it, but hitting enter in the address bar does. Seen on iOS, macOS, Windows, and Linux, mostly in very normal browsers (I’d expect mobile Safari in particular is at least on their top-5 most-seen browsers). I’d assumed they were trying to annoy me enough that I install their app. I’ve seen many others report the same kind of reliable, very frequent errors. Notably, I’m also not logged in, which might be another thing they’re trying to get me to do and another difference between those who hit this more often than not, and those who rarely or never see it. It’s been like this for years.
    - aprdm 6y ago
      That sucks! I heard reddit also does things differently when you're logged in/ logged off. I haven't had a bad experience with these platforms myself but it sucks that it is so bad for other people.
      - bananaface 6y ago
        The page loading thing used to happen to me regardless of login status, but it's less frequent now. The crashing was mostly just on mobile - that's still a problem. If I remember right the app would also crash but it could take bigger loads. Not sure, I uninstalled it.

_____s 6y ago

I'm not sure it's the cheap companies or developers driving this. Even companies that pay really well produce pretty slow software (Gmail, etc.). It's mostly the ecosystem in which software is developed. As someone else said, businesses hire software engineers to solve business problems. Speed often isn't a priority. Fast software will make the experience perceivably better, but it's hard to get on a sales call and tell a potential customer that your application loads much faster when they are looking for feature X. And most companies buying software are looking at a checklist of features first and then maybe the experience. You also need to put in the time to make software fast and then keep it fast. It's not something you can tack on at the end—if you want something to be fast, that has to be carefully considered from the very beginning. By the time people notice something is too slow, you're burdened by half baked architecture and a monstrosity of a codebase. At that point, it's near impossible to really make anything fast.

gregjor 6y ago
> most companies buying software are looking at a checklist of features first and then maybe the experience. I think the hugely successful SalesForce proves this point. Just one standout among many such products.
- bananaface 6y ago
  I would argue they won because of marketing, not because they had unique functionality. Features are not that hard to build, most basic tooling can be cloned with a relatively small budget.
  - _____s 6y ago
    Most enterprise businesses win because of better sales and distribution, but your product ultimately has to support your sales. Salesforce had both (and other advantages). How does sales work in medium to large B2B? You'll get a RFP with a list of questions, you'll often get a list of features that company X wants. Naturally, as a company, you'd focus on building those features instead of optimising speed. If the market values fast software, you'll see a lot more fast software. There _is_ a lot of unnecessarily slow software these days, so it _is_ starting to happen. Think Superhuman, Linear.app, etc. — an entire category of software based primarily on the idea of being fast, aimed at the power user. If these apps succeed, you'll see a lot more of them. If the market doesn't value fast software, most commercial software will be slow.