6 ms·

> For any normal CRUD app, it should take milliseconds to do whatever task. Even with network delays, 150 milliseconds is a reasonable upper bound for end-to-en

> For any normal CRUD app, it should take milliseconds to do whatever task. Even with network delays, 150 milliseconds is a reasonable upper bound for end-to-end processing This is only really true with stable, high speed internet connections. We still cannot take for granted that everyone has that, especially not in rural areas and double especially not on mobile devices

akdor1154 2y ago
And when your users are in the same continent as your backend.
maximilianthe1 2y ago
Also, inside buildings in very urban areas
- rapind 2y ago
  Also in my house in the first world because our telcos are an order of magnitude worse than third world telcos.
  - n_plus_1_acc 2y ago
    Hello fellow german
  - nayuki 2y ago
    > my house in the first world because our telcos are an order of magnitude worse than third world telcos Hello fellow Canadian
    - RHSeeger 2y ago
      Where I used to live, in NY (not NYC, but close to _a_ major city), I had to go out onto my front porch to use my cell phone. It wasn't a great signal out there, but it was better than the _no_ signal inside my apartment.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ndriscoll 2y ago
At least on my mobile, I get ~100 ms ping to most things. Admittedly I don't use it very often so it's hard to have a real world feel for how frequent things like dropouts are, but that's mostly because data costs a lot. That kind of also ties into developers doing a bad job though (e.g. sending me 10 MB of who knows what when the task (like paying for parking) fundamentally should be doable with a few kB, most of which are the TLS handshake). If they didn't do that, their thing would be instant with 3g speeds. Most CRUD generally just doesn't need a lot of data to actually accomplish the desired task. Satellite Internet will be slow, but should still be well under a second? I'd still expect that even extreme cases, you wouldn't expect a spinner to complete a single revolution. So it still seems unnecessary. Anyway, I'm generally on a reliable 300 Mbit/s connection where my pings are more like 20-70 ms, so I suppose you could alter my statement to "if I see a spinner, I interpret it as incompetence".
jagged-chisel 2y ago
So many places in apps just wait for no reason. Let's take a hypothetical situation: Suppose you're doing gig delivery. You're delivering to two customers in the same neighborhood on the same run. You drop the first order, take your photo of the drop, and the app spins. It's waiting for the photo to be delivered before it moves on. You can't get directions to the next customer until the app moves along. Why can't it just take the photo, take the text description, and hold that until service is better? Just give the driver the map, and upload the other stuff when you can. I have similar issues with every app. It seems like every user interaction, every button press requires a round-trip to the server before the app moves to the next step. There's no reason for this. I wager that every app can keep its UI and the user's data locally, and send and receive teensy data updates. But all "the best" software development employees (that they claim their hiring process hires) in these companies can't seem to work that out.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  That’s bizarre. The whole point of having an app instead of a website is to have more processing occur locally, right?
  - jagged-chisel 2y ago
    > The whole point of having an app instead of a website is to have more processing occur locally, right? One would think this is the case. I agree it should be. > That’s bizarre. Unfortunately, it's not. It's normal operation.
  - ponector 2y ago
    Why is it so? The whole point of app is to gather your info from the phone and to send you tons of notifications. And don't forget mandatory updates, when you open an app and cannot use it without updating to the latest crappy version.
  - roughly 2y ago
    The whole point of having an app is to collect data, show ads, and “engage the customer with the brand.” Any additional capabilities beyond that are incidental.
anigbrowl 2y ago
Then it should give explicit status information like uploading to server (xx%)...OK waiting for response...delayed. Check again in 3 minutes. Not as cool, but at least somewhat informative. Engineers have a responsibility to push back on this kind of thing, because marketing people frequently do not think about failure modes or actually put themselves in the customer's shoes.
- kristianc 2y ago
  > marketing people frequently do not think about failure modes or actually put themselves in the customer's shoes It’s literally the job of marketing people to put themselves in the customer’s shoes. If engineering isn’t looping in marketing on UX challenges, or if marketing is too focused on top-of-funnel vanity metrics to engage deeply with product usability, things fall through the cracks. But that’s a company culture issue, not a marketing deficiency.
  - anigbrowl 2y ago
    It should be, but it isn't in my experience. Marketing people care about onboarding and engagement numbers, and are a major driver of dark patterns - everything from popups to moving the 'close dialog' icon to unintuitive places like the bottom left of unasked-for video embeds.
    - brookst 2y ago
      Massive over-generalization. I’m sorry you only worked with terrible, unethical, incompetent marketing people. There are good ones, just like there are bad programmers who do all sorts of terrible and dumb things without creating universal truths about programmers.
      - anigbrowl 2y ago
        I don't think so; I said marketing people frequently do bad stuff, which is not the same as saying they're all bad. I stand by 'frequently', because just look at how much terrible adware, clickbait, spam etc there is on the web. It's a Gresham's law-type situation. Of course marketing people do a valuable job in terms of figuring out how to sell things and minimize the gap between producers and customers. But - just like engineers - there are lots of cynical and amoral people who work in that industry who make things worse for everyone else. By contrast, I can't think of any society that is suffering because they don't have enough advertising.
mihaaly 2y ago
It sucks to live with a dial in nowadays.

akdor1154 2y ago

And when your users are in the same continent as your backend.

maximilianthe1 2y ago

Also, inside buildings in very urban areas

rapind 2y ago
Also in my house in the first world because our telcos are an order of magnitude worse than third world telcos.
- n_plus_1_acc 2y ago
  Hello fellow german
- nayuki 2y ago
  > my house in the first world because our telcos are an order of magnitude worse than third world telcos Hello fellow Canadian
  - RHSeeger 2y ago
    Where I used to live, in NY (not NYC, but close to _a_ major city), I had to go out onto my front porch to use my cell phone. It wasn't a great signal out there, but it was better than the _no_ signal inside my apartment.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ndriscoll 2y ago

At least on my mobile, I get ~100 ms ping to most things. Admittedly I don't use it very often so it's hard to have a real world feel for how frequent things like dropouts are, but that's mostly because data costs a lot. That kind of also ties into developers doing a bad job though (e.g. sending me 10 MB of who knows what when the task (like paying for parking) fundamentally should be doable with a few kB, most of which are the TLS handshake). If they didn't do that, their thing would be instant with 3g speeds. Most CRUD generally just doesn't need a lot of data to actually accomplish the desired task. Satellite Internet will be slow, but should still be well under a second? I'd still expect that even extreme cases, you wouldn't expect a spinner to complete a single revolution. So it still seems unnecessary. Anyway, I'm generally on a reliable 300 Mbit/s connection where my pings are more like 20-70 ms, so I suppose you could alter my statement to "if I see a spinner, I interpret it as incompetence".

jagged-chisel 2y ago

So many places in apps just wait for no reason. Let's take a hypothetical situation: Suppose you're doing gig delivery. You're delivering to two customers in the same neighborhood on the same run. You drop the first order, take your photo of the drop, and the app spins. It's waiting for the photo to be delivered before it moves on. You can't get directions to the next customer until the app moves along. Why can't it just take the photo, take the text description, and hold that until service is better? Just give the driver the map, and upload the other stuff when you can. I have similar issues with every app. It seems like every user interaction, every button press requires a round-trip to the server before the app moves to the next step. There's no reason for this. I wager that every app can keep its UI and the user's data locally, and send and receive teensy data updates. But all "the best" software development employees (that they claim their hiring process hires) in these companies can't seem to work that out.

bee_rider 2y ago
That’s bizarre. The whole point of having an app instead of a website is to have more processing occur locally, right?
- jagged-chisel 2y ago
  > The whole point of having an app instead of a website is to have more processing occur locally, right? One would think this is the case. I agree it should be. > That’s bizarre. Unfortunately, it's not. It's normal operation.
- ponector 2y ago
  Why is it so? The whole point of app is to gather your info from the phone and to send you tons of notifications. And don't forget mandatory updates, when you open an app and cannot use it without updating to the latest crappy version.
- roughly 2y ago
  The whole point of having an app is to collect data, show ads, and “engage the customer with the brand.” Any additional capabilities beyond that are incidental.

anigbrowl 2y ago

Then it should give explicit status information like uploading to server (xx%)...OK waiting for response...delayed. Check again in 3 minutes. Not as cool, but at least somewhat informative. Engineers have a responsibility to push back on this kind of thing, because marketing people frequently do not think about failure modes or actually put themselves in the customer's shoes.

kristianc 2y ago
> marketing people frequently do not think about failure modes or actually put themselves in the customer's shoes It’s literally the job of marketing people to put themselves in the customer’s shoes. If engineering isn’t looping in marketing on UX challenges, or if marketing is too focused on top-of-funnel vanity metrics to engage deeply with product usability, things fall through the cracks. But that’s a company culture issue, not a marketing deficiency.
- anigbrowl 2y ago
  It should be, but it isn't in my experience. Marketing people care about onboarding and engagement numbers, and are a major driver of dark patterns - everything from popups to moving the 'close dialog' icon to unintuitive places like the bottom left of unasked-for video embeds.
  - brookst 2y ago
    Massive over-generalization. I’m sorry you only worked with terrible, unethical, incompetent marketing people. There are good ones, just like there are bad programmers who do all sorts of terrible and dumb things without creating universal truths about programmers.
    - anigbrowl 2y ago
      I don't think so; I said marketing people frequently do bad stuff, which is not the same as saying they're all bad. I stand by 'frequently', because just look at how much terrible adware, clickbait, spam etc there is on the web. It's a Gresham's law-type situation. Of course marketing people do a valuable job in terms of figuring out how to sell things and minimize the gap between producers and customers. But - just like engineers - there are lots of cynical and amoral people who work in that industry who make things worse for everyone else. By contrast, I can't think of any society that is suffering because they don't have enough advertising.

mihaaly 2y ago

It sucks to live with a dial in nowadays.