4 ms·

The lack of performance as an aspiration is certainly part of the problem, but it also feels like there is a certain level of lack of intuition for the subject

The lack of performance as an aspiration is certainly part of the problem, but it also feels like there is a certain level of lack of intuition for the subject matter. If they believe that they are doing great and you’d need a full PhD dissertation to improve, and they 1000x below the base expectation of what someone can do in 2 days without even doing basic profiling and optimization. Then the problem is deeper than not valuing performance, it also speaks to a team that severely lacks an awareness of what they are working with. I feel like this is similar to situations I have seen where people “explain” why database queries take several minutes to return with excuses like “that makes sense because we have years worth of data stored in the database” when in reality it’s because someone doesn’t understand how a composite index works. Someone who has a bit of intuition for db’s instantly knows something is wrong, but if your team lacks anyone with that intuitions, your team will spend their time finding “explanations” for the bad performance instead of fixing it.

jiggawatts 5y ago
I made a comment here recently that one cause of this problem is that computer performance crosses something like 13 orders of magnitude: Everything from functions taking mere nanoseconds all the way up to multi-minute processing. In the "middle" of that enormous range, it's easy to make an incorrect judgement of how long something ought to take. This came up with the Grand Theft Auto game loading issue that was discussed here. Many people made statements like: "JSON parsing is slow", which isn't even wrong, it's just that it's not that slow. A significant part of "experience" is having a good feel for what's normal. But even there, experience can lead people astray: the more years of experience you have, the more your expectations are weighted by out-dated information! Again, this crosses many orders of magnitude. Rules of thumb from the 1990s are incorrect by a factor of a thousand, and averaging them into an overall skillset will lead to enormous mistakes.

jiggawatts 5y ago

I made a comment here recently that one cause of this problem is that computer performance crosses something like 13 orders of magnitude: Everything from functions taking mere nanoseconds all the way up to multi-minute processing. In the "middle" of that enormous range, it's easy to make an incorrect judgement of how long something ought to take. This came up with the Grand Theft Auto game loading issue that was discussed here. Many people made statements like: "JSON parsing is slow", which isn't even wrong, it's just that it's not that slow. A significant part of "experience" is having a good feel for what's normal. But even there, experience can lead people astray: the more years of experience you have, the more your expectations are weighted by out-dated information! Again, this crosses many orders of magnitude. Rules of thumb from the 1990s are incorrect by a factor of a thousand, and averaging them into an overall skillset will lead to enormous mistakes.