> We’re just doing more because we can now. Are we though? Our computers are orders of magnitude faster than they were. What new features justify consuming 10

> We’re just doing more because we can now. Are we though? Our computers are orders of magnitude faster than they were. What new features justify consuming 100x or more CPU, RAM, network and disk space? Is my email software doing orders of magnitude more work to render an email compared to the 90s? Does discord have that many more features compared to mIRC that it makes sense for it to take several seconds to open on my 8 core M1 laptop? For reference, mIRC was a 2mb binary and I swear it opened faster on my pentium 2 than discord takes to open on my 2023 laptop. By the standards of 1995 we all walk around with supercomputers in our pockets. But you wouldn't know it, because the best hardware in the world still can't keep pace with badly written software. As the old line from the 1990s goes, "what Andy giveth, Bill taketh away."[1] (Andy Grove was CEO at the time of Intel.) My instinct is that as more and more engineers work "up the stack" we're collectively forgetting how to write efficient code. Or just not bothering. Why optimize your react web app when everyone will have new phones in a few years with more RAM? If the users complain, blame them for having old hardware. I find this process deeply disrespectful to our users. Our users pay thousands of dollars for good computer hardware because they want their computer to run fast and well. But all of that capacity is instead chewed through by developers the world over trying to save a buck during development time. Every hardware upgrade our users make just becomes the new baseline for how lazy we can be. Slow CI/CD pipelines are a completely artificial problem. There's absolutely no technical reason that they need to run so slowly. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law