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Yeah it’s getting worse. As a commenter points out, we now have fucking chat and email clients that take up literal gigabytes of ram and who knows how much on d
by bedobi 3y ago
Yeah it’s getting worse. As a commenter points out, we now have fucking chat and email clients that take up literal gigabytes of ram and who knows how much on disk, and despite orders of magnitude more computing power are slower than ever, which is idiotic. And self serving as it may be, I don’t believe it’s because of unskilled, lazy or noncommitted devs. Most devs do the best they can within the constraints imposed on them. When a PM comes with the latest idiotic pet feature that isn’t as much for actual users as to pad their resume and enable them to climb the next step on their career ladder, devs have to make do, and often that amounts to mild protest, being overruled and then throwing their arms up. And I don’t even blame PMs - likewise, they’re just playing the hand they’ve been dealt. No PM or developer gets promoted for increasing reliability or speed, or reducing RAM or space on disk. Often, you get promoted for adding bloating buggy junk that no users actually use. How is that possible in this age of data driven decision making? Oh my friend if you only knew the ability of people to come up with fake and misguiding data to justify even the least used, most pointless features.
I will end my cynical rant here.
- upon_drumhead 3y agoLeast for email, you don’t have to use the bloatware. Mutt still exists and works just fine. If there are features you want in the bloated clients, that’s on you as the end user to make that choice. I do agree with your rant in principle and doubly so with chat clients.
- MattGaiser 3y ago> How is that possible in this age of data driven decision making? Probably because reducing RAM usage has even less potential than a feature nobody uses. Someone might use a feature, so you can take a risk on it. Who (who might otherwise buy Slack) wouldn't buy Slack because it uses 1-2 gigs of RAM?
- bedobi 3y agoA lot of decisions are like that - individually, they’re the right one to make at the time, but they add up, and when there isn’t any serious framework for looking critically at their place in the whole, you end up with what we have, which is apps with a handful of core features people actually want and use, drowning in an avalanche of pointless bloated junk. And those apps in turn add up, even a latest gen m2 pro will struggle running Slack, Zoom, Excel, IntelliJ, Mail, Chrome etc etc which REALLY shouldn’t be the case. (AND proves that talk of “we don’t need to optimize, these days computers can easily run whatever” simply isn’t true - resources are like a vacuum, they expand junk until the junk fills the void, when the space could in fact have been better used by actually useful things)
- beeboobaa 3y ago> Most devs do the best they can within the constraints imposed on them. This is not really my experience. Most devs within a corporate structure are lazy and will do the bare minimum.
- bedobi 3y agoFair enough, but even if you’re lazy, it’s legitimately difficult to design a chat or email app that takes gigs and gigs of ram. You really have to try hard to bloat it as much as possible. But that bloat comes naturally with the incentive structure of the modern software industry.
- alphabettsy 3y agoIs that because of incentives? I’ve repeatedly seen absolutely terrible developers who ship rapidly praised over developers who are skilled and deliberate. I think it’s even more complicated than that but I agree many developers don’t care or don’t know better, but that’s true of any job.